E PILGRIM'S PROGRESS 
TOCULTURE 





Glass .Lj C 3-1 



THE 

PILGRIM'S PROGRESS 

TO CULTURE 

By PHILIP GIBBS 

11 

Edited by HELEN CRAMP 



Philadelphia 

THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY 

1915 






z p 



TURNS IN THE PATH 



PAGE 

1. Wanted: A Guide 5 

2. The Study of Biography 14 

3. Books which Must be Read ... 24 

4. The Reading of History 38 

5. The Highway of English Litera- 

ture 48 

6. The Influence of Poetry .... 61 

7. The Education of Art 70 

8. The Charm of Music 80 

9. Sermons in Stones 89 

10. English Novels and Novelists. . 98 

11. On the Study of Human Nature. 115 

12. The Advantages of Travel . . . 123 

13. The Art of Conversation .... 129 

3 



FIRST TURN 

Wanted: A Guide 

There are many young men nowadays who 
have a very sensible knowledge of their own 
ignorance. They have had a certain amount 
of schooling — the minimum required; and 
now their education is supposed to be complete; 
for they are wage-earners and business men, 
with no more need to learn. And yet what 
is the sum of their knowledge? Let us see. 
They can do a bit of arithmetic, sufficient 
anyway to carry them through the everyday 
affairs of life. They also know a thing or two 
about geography, at least of their own country. 
As for history, they know the names of the 
kings and queens of England and the presidents 
of the United States — or most of them — and a 
few old " chestnuts" such as Henry VIII having 
six wives — or eight, was it? — and King John 
losing the Crown Jewels in the Wash — probably 
through the dishonesty of his washerwoman. 
When they were at school they did a little 
parsing, a little Euclid, a little algebra, a little 
of sundry other things; but the memory of 
them has passed with the schooldays. 

5 



WANTED: A GUIDE 

A Knowledge of Ignorance 

So the clear-headed young man, who is 
frank enough to admit his deficiencies, wakes 
up one day and says, "How densely ignorant 
I am!" Then he sighs and turns to the latest 
sensational story in his newspaper. Deep 
down in his heart he has a longing to know more 
than he does. He knows at least that beyond 
his own ken is a realm of knowledge, vast and 
wonderful. Now and again he comes across 
a man who seems to have traversed a part 
at least of this knowledge-world — a man whose 
mind seems filled with a great store of precious 
facts, who has become intimate with the 
thoughts of the Immortals, who considers the 
problems of life with a wisdom learned from a 
large experience of the literature of past and 
present ages, and who is called by public 
opinion a Cultured Man. 

The young man, deploring his own ignorance, 
is conscious of an immeasurable gulf between 
himself and this cultured acquaintance. It is 
not a gulf caused by wealth or social position, 
but a superiority of mental attainments. Our 
young friend knows that nowadays knowledge 
is not the monopoly of the rich, nor even of the 
so-called leisure classes, but is open, free from 
barrier, to every individual soul. And so he 
sighs, feeling that he ought, and wishing to 

6 



WANTED : .A GUIDE 

goodness he could, acquire some of that liberal 
education which makes his cultured friend so 
much better and stronger and broader a 
personality than himself. 

Where is the Guide? 

But the fact is, he does not have the least 
idea how to go to work, where to begin, or how 
to begin, what direction to take, what goal to 
aim at. He is like a traveler who sets out to find 
a treasure, but has no map to tell him where to 
go, and no guides to lead him. Before him is a 
vast forest disclosing innumerable mazy paths. 
There is no sign-post to point out the highway, 
and if he ventures into one of the by-paths there 
is every chance that he will go wandering about 
in an unprofitable quest leading nowhere in 
particular. So, rather than take the risk, he 
makes up his mind that the treasure can go 
hang, and turns back to his cottage to smoke 
his pipe — sans treasure, sans trouble. 

Exactly is it with regard to Culture. A 
young man sees stretching before him in 
imagination an infinitude of subjects, an 
infinitude of books. Where shall he begin, 
how make his choice, what aim for? He makes 
one or two attempts, but is disheartened. He 
goes to a public library and turns over the 
pages of the catalogue, but stands appalled at 

7 



WANTED: A GUIDE 

the vista before him. "I take all knowledge 
for my province," said Francis Bacon; but 
the modern student shakes his head and wishes 
he knew the trick of the thing. 

You will see such a fellow wander round the 
reading-room of a library, gazing wistfully 
at the shelves, and eyeing the backs of the 
volumes. At last he seems attracted by some 
title, and takes out the book to dip into it, 
but lays it down presently with a grimace. 
He realizes the utter futility of plunging 
haphazard into a study, having he knows not 
how many offshoots, and leading he knows not 
whither. So he turns his back on the library, 
and goes to watch a baseball game or a moving- 
picture show. 

Now, there is wasted talent. There is an 
ambition rotting for something to feed on. 
There is a man resting in his dense ignorance, 
who, if he had been put on the right track, 
might have added to the store of the world's 
knowledge, and would have certainly broadened 
his own mind and heart by self-culture. There 
are thousands of such fellows today. What 
they want is a guide along the path to culture, 
"a guide, philosopher, and friend/' who will 
point out to them what goal to aim for, and how 
to attain it without vain meanderings in wrong 
directions. 

8 



WANTED: A GUIDE 

The Long Pilgrimage 

In the following pages I propose, as far as 
my own experience will extend, to act as a 
guide along the Pilgrim's Way to Culture. I 
want to gather round me all those young 
men and women who start, as I started, as 
ignorant as an ordinary school education 
generally leaves one. I want to show what 
subjects should be taken up first, and how 
studied; which methods are best suited for 
self-tuition, and which best to avoid. Those 
who have read the Pilgrim's Progress by John 
Bunyan will remember how Christian in his 
journey to the Delectable Mountains fell into 
the Slough of Despond, and afterwards encoun- 
tered Giant Despair. Now, I want my 
Pilgrims to avoid these stumbling-blocks, and 
I shall show them how to avoid the snares and 
pitfalls -on the way. I shall guide them 
gradually farther and farther along the road, 
showing how they may, by perseverance and 
energy, become possessors of that priceless 
treasure which may be gained by all who tread 
the Pilgrim's Way. 

What is the Goal? 

For what is culture? It does not mean quite 
the same thing as knowledge. A man may 
have a vast deal of knowledge and yet little 

9 



WANTED: A GUIDE 

culture. Knowledge is the possession of facts; 
but culture belongs to those who can estimate 
facts at their right worth, and whose character 
has been moulded by them. The man who 
seeks mere knowledge may become hard and 
narrow, a lumber-room for the accumulation 
of intellectual stock, a miser hoarding up gold 
that, without circulation, is as valueless as dust. 
But the cultured man puts all his attainments 
to their highest use; they not only broaden and 
elevate his own mind, but they have a radiating 
influence upon all about him. 

The "practical man" who looks with 
pessimism upon the outlook of the nation will 
say, "Hang your culture! We don't want 
cultured men, but specialists." True enough, 
we do want specialists. I am one of those who 
believe in specialists. I like a man who knows 
his subject as well as it can be known, who has 
explored it to its farthest boundary — whether 
it be electricity or steam, bacteriology or 
book-binding. But I am firmly of opinion 
that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred 
the specialist can find time to be cultured. 
It is a mistake to think that most people are 
overworked. On the contrary, most people 
have a fair share of leisure, and it depends on 
themselves whether they spend it profitably 
or otherwise. 

10 



WANTED: A GUIDE 

The Cultured Man 

Our practical friend is wrong when he says 
"Hang your culture!" We do want culture 
very badly. It is the thing we want most in 
life, and worth more than the invention of the 
steam-engine or wireless telegraphy. The 
object of mankind should be— the aspiration 
of all wise, reforming men is— to raise the 
standard of the race, to bring men a little 
nearer to the angels, a little farther from the 
brutes. Then let us get culture. Let us 
develop every side of our nature broadly, 
equably, not producing a race of specialists 
each with some moral or mental bump abnor- 
mally developed, nor handing down to the next 
generation characteristics that will produce 
such a state of things as foreshadowed in Mr. 
H. G. Wells' Anticipations. The cultured man 
is educated all around; his nature is well- 
poised, melodious and whole. His soul is 
receptive of all the refining influences of life, 
responsive always to beauty of thought and 
form, color and sound. The baser promptings 
of his being have been crushed under heel by a 
wisdom learned from intercourse with the 
intellectuals of many an age and nation. He is 
a considerate man because he can look at 
questions from many points of view, a kindly 
man because books have taught him sympathy 

11 



WANTED: A GUIDE 

for many sorts of character, a " clubbable 
man" (as Doctor Johnson phrased it) because 
he has in his brain a store of pleasant and 
profitable knowledge which he gives out when 
wanted for the benefit of others. 

A Practical Guide 

This is what I mean by culture, and it is in 
the pursuit of such a character as this that I 
want my friends to follow me along that road 
I have called the Pilgrim's Way. My guidance, 
such as it is, will be a practical one. I shall 
not talk rhetorical flummery to tickle the ears 
of my audience, but shall endeavor to put on 
paper some advice that will help self-students to 
avoid much stumbling and blundering. I shall 
mention books that are reliable as well as 
stimulating. This question of authorities 
is most difficult. What vain hours have been 
spent on the study of books that have proved 
worthless! What praiseworthy efforts have 
been led astray by the consultation of wrong 
authorities! Of the making of books there is 
no end, and of modern books more than half 
are absolutely without merit. How difficult 
it is, then, for students without a guide to 
select the right books— not difficult, but next 
to impossible. I propose, then, to act as a 
guide, as far as I can, to self-taught students 

12 



WANTED: A GUIDE 

who will proceed with me along the Pilgrim's 
Way. It happens that I have come into close 
touch with all sorts and conditions of books, 
some good and many bad. The knowledge 
that I have is at the disposal of my readers. 



13 



SECOND TURN 

The Study of Biography 

The World's Leadeks 

I advise all young men and women, at the 
outset of their career, to begin by studying the 
biographies of some of the greatest characters 
in the world's history. There is no other form 
of literature which is so stimulating as biog- 
raphy. I am ignorant? I am uncultured? 
I have no guiding principles, no ambitions, no 
philosophy? Very well, let me see what manner 
of men and women were these people who did 
big things in their time. What were the 
motives which animated them? How did they 
overcome the obstacles in their path? What 
was their outlook upon life, and how far did 
their force of character carve out their for- 
tunes? How far was their character moulded 
by their surroundings, by the circumstances 
of their time and the accidents of fate? One 
cannot read the biographies of remarkable 
persons without acquiring some of their 
philosophy and their ideals, and without, 
perhaps unconsciously but none the less surely, 
storing up some of their force. 

U 



STUDY OF BIOGRAPHY 

The Looking-glass of Life 

Plutarch, who wrote biographies eighteen 
centuries ago, prefaced one of them by the 
following wise words, which are as true today 
as then: — "It was," he said, "for the sake of 
others that I first commenced writing biogra- 
phies; but I find myself proceeding and 
attaching myself to it for my own, the virtues 
of these great men now serving me as a sort 
of looking-glass in which I may see how to 
adjust and adorn my own life. Indeed, it can 
be compared to nothing but daily living and 
associating together; we receive, as it were, in 
our inquiry, and entertain each successive 
guest, view 

" 'Their stature and their qualities/ 

and select from their action all that is noblest 
and worthiest to know. 

" 'Ah, what greater pleasure could we have' 

or what more effective means to one's moral 
improvement? Democritus tells us we ought 
to pray that of the phantasms appearing in the 
circumambient air, such may present them- 
selves to us as are propitious, and that we may 
rather meet with those that are agreeable* to 
our natures, and are good, than the evil and 

15 



STUDY OF BIOGRAPHY 

the unfortunate; which is simply introducing 
into philosophy a doctrine untrue in itself, 
and leading to endless superstitions. My 
method, on the contrary, is, by the study of 
history and by the familiarity acquired in 
writing, to habituate my memory to receive 
and retain images of the best and worthiest 
characters. I thus am enabled to free myself 
from any ignoble, base, or vicious impressions, 
contracted from the contagion of ill-company 
that I may be unavoidably engaged in, by 
the remedy of turning my thoughts in a 
happy and calm temper to view these noble 
examples." 

When we read the life-stories of men and 
women, we ourselves participate to some 
extent in their own experiences. Insensibly 
we place ourselves in the situations in which 
they found themselves, and the problems which 
confronted them seek their solution in our own 
brains; their difficulties, their stumblings, 
their triumphs become personal lessons, by 
which we may get a wider experience of life 
than comes to us in our ordinary vocations, 
so that when the time comes when we are 
called upon for some momentous decision, 
or to pursue some special line of conduct, 
we have a precedent to guide us to the right 
course. 

16 



STUDY OF BIOGRAPHY 

Plutarch's Lives 

It is for this reason that I say to my Pilgrims, 
who wish to progress, start by getting the 
acquaintance of some of the world's heroes 
and heroines. And for a beginning I advise 
my friends to go to Plutarch, whose words I 
have quoted above. His Lives have been a 
source of inspiration to eighteen centuries of 
the world's leaders. They are for all nations 
and all ages. No writings of classical antiquity 
have had more influence upon thinking men and 
women from that time to ours; so that Plutarch 
may be called the interpreter of Greece and 
Rome to the modern world. It is not so much 
for the historical material they contain, not for 
the facts they narrate, but because the author's 
aim was the accurate portraiture of character. 
He touched but briefly upon the famous 
actions which distinguish the careers of his 
"heroes," believing that these do not show a 
man's virtues or failings so much as some lightly 
dropped phrase, some idiosyncrasy of char- 
acter, some jest, repartee, or trifling incident. 
As a French critic has truly said: "It is moral 
truth, not historical truth, which he pursues; 
the latter is for him but the means, the former 
the object itself." 

He took for his subjects the men who 
founded the glory of ancient Greece and Rome, 

17 



STUDY OF BIOGRAPHY 

and he described them with some of that 
intimacy that Boswell did Johnson; so that we 
moderns may dine in company with such 
heroes as Coriolanus, Cicero, Alexander and 
Caesar; we may meet them on familiar terms, 
listen to their private discourses in the hour 
of unbending, walk with them in the market- 
place, stand by their side in the Forum, and 
study them in their days both of adversity and 
triumph. When we read Plutarch's Lives, 
we not only enter the company of the greatest 
of Greece and Rome, but we are, as I have said, 
receiving impressions that have moulded the 
characters of great men and women through 
eighteen centuries of history; if we be likewise 
moulded who shall say what work, great or lit- 
tle, we may not be able to accomplish with such 
an influence? I, for one, will not set a limit. 

A Panegyric of Great Men 

Next to this immortal book I recommend 
the reading of Carlyle's Heroes and Hero 
Worship. It is a book inspired by more than a 
spark of divine fire. It came red-hot from 
the soul of a man who was himself something 
of a hero, and who, therefore, had more than 
an ordinary insight into the true meaning of 
heroism, into what constitutes a great man. 
A large topic, says Carlyle, is this subject of 

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STUDY OF BIOGRAPHY 

Heroes, wide as universal history itself, for 
the history of what man has accomplished 
in this world is, at the bottom, the history 
of the great men who have worked here. 
"They were the leaders of men, these great 
ones; the modelers, patterns, and, in a wide 
sense, creators of whatsoever the general mass 
of men contrive to do or to attain; all things 
that we see standing accomplished in the 
world are properly the outer material result, 
the practical realization and embodiment of 
thoughts that dwelt in the great men sent into 
the world; the soul of the whole world's history, 
it may justly be considered, were the history 
of these." Then, in a fine glow of enthusiasm, 
Carlyle indites the panegyric of a Great Man. 
"He is the living light-fountain, which it is 
good and pleasant to be near; the light which 
enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness 
of the world, and this not as a kindled lamp 
only, but rather as a natural luminary shining 
by the gift of heaven; a flowing light-fountain, 
as I say, of native original insight, of manhood 
and heroic nobleness, in whose radiance all 
souls feel that it is well with them." 

Men Who Fought and Won 

Next — to those who have not already done 
so — I would say, read the biographies in Self- 

19 



STUDY OF BIOGRAPHY 

help by Samuel Smiles. Fifteen years ago 
it would have been superfluous to have recom- 
mended a book which had found a place in 
every household, but there are fashions in 
books as in most things, and what is read by 
everyone today is often forgotten by nearly 
everyone a decade later. Yet Selfhelp is a 
work that has raised a good many men from 
the bottom to the topmost rung of the ladder. 
With Plutarch's Lives of the Ancient Heroes and 
Smiles' Lives of Modern Heroes, a man may 
look the world in the face without blinking, and 
know the mission he has set his mind to fulfil. 
To some of my readers no doubt Selfhelp will 
appeal more closely than old Plutarch; and 
certainly young men and women with more 
ambitions than attainments, with a goal in 
view but many obstacles in the way, will take 
heart when they see how some of the noblest 
work has been achieved in the face of stupen- 
dous difficulty — how men, poor, uncultivated, 
powerless at the start, have carved their way 
through every barrier and snatched victory 
from the grasp of every foe. 

Men of Ideals 

The lives of the Saints should be studied, 
apart from any religious or doctrinal point of 
view. Whether we believe in miracles or 

20 



STUDY OF BIOGRAPHY 

whether we don't, whether we call ourselves 
Protestants, Catholics, or Jews, the life-stories 
of the men and women who by their virtue, 
courage, and enthusiasm upheld the Christian 
faith and led people to higher and nobler aims, 
who, for their ideal's sake, dared all things and 
suffered all things, who made many blunders, 
perhaps, and whose pure gold was mixed, 
maybe, with not a little earthly dross, should 
be read reverently and studied carefully by all 
who would shape their souls into a noble and 
heroic pattern. For the lives of such men as 
Augustine, Bernard, Francis of Assisi, Francis 
of Sales bring home to one the truth that out 
of the commonest clay may be wrought the 
noble and heroic, and that, in the circum- 
stances of everyday life, "the common round, 
the trivial task," may be found a field for the 
exercise of every phase of character, from the 
basest of the base to the highest of the high. 

No little of the interest in both ancient and 
modern history depends upon the pen pictures 
of men and women which lighten and humanize 
its pages. Who, for instance, can forget the 
portrait of Queen Elizabeth in Green's History, 
one of the most remarkable pieces of character 
analysis in all published literature? And such 
works as Holinshed's Chronicle, Clarendon's His- 
tory of the Rebellion, Burnet's History of HisOwn 

21 



STUDY OF BIOGRAPHY 

Time, and Shakespeare's historical plays have 
an interest due to the portraits of individuals 
even more than to their historical facts. This 
is also true of Macaulay's History, and to still 
greater extent of Carlyle's French Revolution, 

A Gkeat Ckitic 

Macaulay's Essays, including the biogra- 
phies of such great men as Chatham, Clive, and 
Warren Hastings, are among the masterpieces 
of biographical art, and will give to students 
who have never before read any of Macaulay's 
writings the "Macaulay enthusiasm," which 
at one time or another is bound to be caught 
by all lovers of literature. Johnson's Lives of 
the Poets are worth reading, not so much for 
his criticism of their poetry, as for his delinea- 
tion of their characters. His biography of 
Richard Savage is one of the finest efforts of 
English prose. Dr. Johnson's own Life, by 
Boswell, is a liberal education in itself; and 
those who listen to the conversations on a 
thousand problems of life, philosophy and 
literature, as held by the Doctor and his 
distinguished circle of friends, and chronicled 
by the faithful Boswell, will find they have a 
wider outlook upon the world of thought, and 
that by keeping company with these wits and 
philosophers they have gained some of the 

22 



STUDY OF BIOGRAPHY 

culture that comes from the society of learned, 
noble, and eloquent men. 

The field of biography in America, though 
not so rich as that of England, is still a splendid 
treasure-house for the student who would 
read and, reading, learn to live. Biographies 
of Washington, Lincoln, John Quincy Adams, 
Henry Clay, Patrick Henry, Daniel Webster, 
Thomas Jefferson, Grant, Lee, Longfellow, 
Emerson, Thoreau, Phillips Brooks, and a host 
of others lead the reader not only to a better 
understanding of our national life but to a finer 
conception of the fundamental problems of all 
living and a closer grasp of the great realities 
of his own life. 

No form of biographical composition is of 
more abiding interest than the autobiography, 
in which a man unlocks the very doors of his 
heart, and such books as St. Augustine's 
Confessions, the spiritual history of a great 
intellect, mastered and moulded by religion; 
Cardinal Newman's Apologia, hardly less 
valuable as a spiritual confession; De Quincey's 
Confessions of an Opium Eater, one of the 
strangest books in our language; and Goethe's 
self-revealing Dichtung und Wahrheit are so 
full of inspiration and stimulus that one who is 
seeking culture rather than knowledge can 
scarcely dare to pass them by. 

23 



THIRD TURN 
Books which Must be Read 

The Greatest Books 

In the world's literature there is a certain 
number of books, which, since they first came 
from the brains and hearts of their authors, 
have been beacons of light to countless men 
and women, whose characters have been 
impregnated with their influence, and whose 
life-work has been shaped accordingly. Of 
such books there is not a multitude. They 
may be set up in a row on a fair-sized book- 
shelf. They are like the foundations of a huge 
and lofty building, piled high upon a narrow 
base. For a vast number of our modern 
books owe their origin to these. From these 
great sources of literature have flowed (if I 
may change my metaphor) innumerable rivers 
with innumerable tributaries, traversing so 
many realms of knowledge that many a man 
and woman is content with living a lifetime in 
some backwater, never exploring, perhaps 
never hearing of the great reservoirs from which 
most of our modern wisdom has come. But 
this is a watery simile, and lest I should damp 
my readers I will leave it. 

24 



WHICH MUST BE READ 

What I want to maintain is, that the master- 
minds of the world have all gone to a few pre- 
eminently great books. Therefore, I think it 
foolish for modern students, who desire to 
cultivate their intellects and to form their 
characters, to waste time upon a mass of 
modern rubbish, or even upon modern " high- 
class" literature, which after all owes its origin 
to works a hundred times more efficacious in 
producing the desired result. I do not mean to 
say that all modern literature is worthless. On 
the contrary, there are, and have been, hun- 
dreds of cultured minds, hundreds of bright 
intellects producing work that extends the 
realm of thought to further regions, and has an 
elevating influence upon the time. But when 
a man or woman has not many advantages 
of leisured education, when time is limited and 
ambition great, why not begin at the beginning 
instead of at the end; why not study first those 
parent-works from which these modern books 
are mostly offshoots? 

The Noblest Literature 

Here, therefore, I will name a few of those 
works which, in my opinion, have had most 
influence upon the world's thinkers. And I 
hope that my readers will now understand the 
scope of the present series sufficiently to 

25 



WHICH MUST BE READ 

appreciate the motive of my suggestions, that 
is, that I am dealing with books formative of 
culture in the highest sense, and not of mere 
knowledge. They must also bear in mind that 
other articles will follow dealing with other 
phases of culture, and that therefore my present 
list has its well-defined limitations. 

Foremost I name the Bible, and I here 
recommend it purely as literature. It is too 
little regarded in this light, yet the Old and 
New Testaments contain the most splendid 
body of national literature that mankind has 
yet produced. For its literature alone, that 
is to say, for the beauty of its language, for the 
sublimity of its poetry, for its grandeur of 
thought, apart altogether from its religion, 
many books of the Bible should be read and 
re-read, and learned by heart, so that they 
sink deep into the soul. Apart again from its 
religion, it is full of practical wisdom, and the 
philosophy of life. The characters portrayed 
in its pages are living types of men and women, 
and though they existed when the world was 
young, their hearts were very much as ours are 
today— their temptations, frailties, struggles, 
sin, heroism, and hopes but prototypes of our 
own. We of English speech have a priceless 
heritage in the translation of the writings to our 
own tongue, for Bible English is most pure, 

26 



WHICH MUST BE READ 

most practical, most grand, and if a man would 
clothe his thoughts in noble words, if he would 
tune his ear to stately rhythm, let him read and 
learn the Psalms of David, the Book of Isaiah, 
the Canticles of Solomon. 

An Imperial Philosopher 

I will now mention a wonderful book by one 
of the noblest of pagans — The Meditations of 
Marcus Aurelius. This man was an emperor 
of Rome when there was but one great empire 
in the world. A man of vast power, a man 
beset with the cares of a worldly ruler, he yet 
was simple and humble, and beneath the 
Imperial purple, too often covering a prodigy 
of cruelty, lust and pride, beat a pagan heart 
so pure, so full of charity, so free from any 
baseness, that we can point to few Christian 
rulers worthy to rank beside him. His reign 
was a troubled one; he had to defend the 
boundaries of his empire from hordes of 
barbaric invaders, his throne from usurpers 
of his own household, but in the council 
chamber and in the camp he kept a mind at 
peace with itself. His meditations were 
written on the fields of war. They were 
probably not intended for publication, and are 
simply the Emperor's commonplace book 
wherein he entered his reflections, disconnected 

27 



WHICH MUST BE READ 

and fragmentary, on the problems of life and 
eternity. They breathe a spirit of wisdom. 
We see here the naked soul of a man set in the 
highest place of the earth, but realizing his own 
infinite insignificance, acknowledging humbly 
that his imperial dignity was but tinsel in the 
eyes of the All-wise, and that he was but a man 
who must live his little life and die. Read this 
" commonplace book" so full of practical 
philosophy. It might have been written 
yesterday, so fresh is its teaching, for there is 
some knowledge that is always young. I am 
tempted to quote some of its splendid counsel, 
but I have only space for a few grains of his 
wisdom. 

Scattered Thoughts 

"It is the custom of people to go to unfre- 
quented places and country places, and the 
seashore and the mountains for retirement; 
and this you often earnestly desired. But, 
after all, this is but a vulgar fancy, for it is in 
your power to withdraw into yourself whenever 
you desire. Now, one's mind is a place the 
most free from crowd and noise in the world, 
if a man's thoughts are such as to ensure him 
perfect tranquillity within, and this tranquil- 
lity consists in the good ordering of the mind. 
Your way is therefore to make frequent use 

28 



WHICH MUST BE READ 

of this retirement, and refresh your virtue 
in it." 

"Now, a social temper was that for which 
man was principally designed." 

"That which is not for the interest of the 
whole swarm is not for the interest of a single 
bee." 

"It is a royal thing to be ill-spoken of for 
good deeds." 

"The best way of revenge is not to imitate 
the injury." 

Here is a noble view of true charity: 

"Some men, when they do you a kindness, 
at once demand the payment of gratitude from 
you; others are more modest than this. 
However, they remember the favor and look 
upon you as their debtor in this. A third sort 
shall scarce know what they have done. These 
are much like a vine, which is satisfied by 
being fruitful in its kind, and bears a bunch 
of grapes without expecting any thanks for it. 
A fleet horse and greyhound do not make a 
noise when they have done well, neither a bee 
when she has made a little honey. . . . Now 
we should imitate these who are so obliging 
as hardly to reflect on their beneficence." 

Here is a fine satire on the affectation of 
virtue : 

"How fulsome and hollow does that man 
29 



WHICH MUST BE READ 

look who cries — 'I am resolved to deal straight- 
forwardly with you.' Hark you, friend, what 
need of all this flourish? Let your actions 
speak; your face ought to vouch for your 
speech. I would have virtue look out of the 
eye, no less apparently than love does in the 
sight of the beloved. I would have honesty 
and sincerity so incorporated with the consti- 
tution, that it should be discoverable by the 
senses." 

The Glomes of Gkeece and Rome 

Next on my list I give the name of Homer. 
How extraordinary is it that so few people 
nowadays, outside the schools and universities, 
dream of reading that most glorious of epic 
poems, the Iliad, and its sequel the Odyssey I 
Here is the fount of poetry. Here is a poem 
that has stirred the hearts of heroes to action 
since the world was young. Homer was the 
bard of the Greeks (or rather of the Achaians) 
in the time of all their freshness, when their 
civilization was in its youth, bound by the 
rites of a religion which was the most beautiful 
form of nature-worship, when personal heroism 
was most lofty, and when man's primeval 
passions, appetites, and conduct were governed 
by a healthiness of body and soul and a simple 
code of moral laws that constituted the state 

30 



WHICH MUST BE READ 

into a nursery of noble manhood. Homer 
was probably unconscious of his own powers. 
Like Shakespeare, he had that simplicity which 
comes from highest genius. He did not 
criticize his age, standing apart from it. He 
was his age; and all its ideals, its grace of 
thought, its imaginative religion, its love of 
beauty and bravery were summed up in him. 
His poem is a mirror of that old state in which 
men's manners were not fettered by convention, 
but in naked freedom. Nature was very much 
with them. The earth and its fruits, the sky 
and its mysteries, the air and its terrors spoke 
to them more nearly than to modern mankind 
with its artificiality. And men's hearts were 
more bared to one another, so that the char- 
acters of Homer are, like those of the Bible, 
types of man's nature stripped of its outer 
husk. 

Greatest of Latin, as Homer is greatest of 
Greek poets — Virgil has deathless renown. 
His Mneidj though not so dramatic as the 
Iliad, has a beauty and a charm all its own. It 
is the charm of exquisite art rather than the 
cry of nature, of poetry serene, harmonious, 
and haunting. It has been well said of him 
by a modern critic (J. W. Mackail): "What 
Virgil has in a degree that no other poet has 
ever equalled, is pity; the sense of 'tears in 

31 



WHICH MUST BE READ 

things/ to which in the most famous of his 
single verses (iEneid I, 1462) he has given 
imperishable expression, and which fills with 
strange insight and profound emotion those 
lonely words and pathetic half-lines where he 
has sounded the depths of beauty and sorrow, 
of patience and magnanimity, of honor in life 
and hope beyond death." 

Popular Philosophy 

I will now name a book of far different 
character and scope, but one full of homely wit 
and wisdom, that is, iEsop's Fables. Msop 
lived some six hundred years b. c, but he is 
another proof that man's nature is very much 
now as it was long years ago. This Phrygian 
slave, as he is said to have been, was at home 
in the animal world. He saw that the beasts 
of the field possess many of the characteristics 
of human beings, and in the spirit of satire he 
let his imagination have free rein, and narrated 
a number of witty tales in which the lower 
animals talk and act in much the same way as 
the lords of creation. Among them are the 
crafty ones, the simple, the greedy, the treach- 
erous, the vain-glorious, the miserly and the 
prodigal; and beneath his animal allegories 
friend iEsop has many a hard hit at the vices 
and frailties of human nature. For centuries 

32 






WHICH MUST BE READ 

the Greeks made the name of iEsop a peg on 
which to hang any of these popular fables, and 
what are now included under his name owe their 
authorship to many sources and ages. They 
contain the philosophy of the people — shrewd, 
practical, and broadly humorous. For centu- 
ries men have laughed at them, quoted them, 
acted by them. The world without Msop 
would be very different, and both his humor 
and his wisdom are as fresh today as on many 
yesterdays ago. 

The First Essayist 

Michael, Lord of Montaigne, is a more 
modern worthy, whose work has been the 
favorite companion of great minds since 
William Shakespeare conned its pages and Ben 
Jonson read it with delight. His Essays are 
the first of their kind, and perhaps the best. 
They contain the self-revelation of their 
author. "All the world," he wrote, "may 
know me by my book, and my book by me." 
He held, as Pope says, that the noblest study 
of mankind is man, and this being so, he 
thought the best way to study man was to 
study himself. "I dare," he says, "not only 
speak of myself, but speak alone of myself." 
And again, "Never man handled subject that 
he understood better than I mine." "So it is, 

33 



WHICH MUST BE READ 

that if any man shall look into these memorials, 
he will find that I have said all, or indicated 
all. What I cannot express, the same I point 
at with my finger; I leave nothing to be 
desired or divined of me." "A pleasant 
fantasy this is of mine. Many things I would 
be loth to tell a particular man, I utter to the 
whole world; and concerning my most secret 
thoughts and inward knowledge, I send my 
dearest friends to a stationer's shop." He is 
absolutely frank, hiding nothing, exaggerating 
nothing, telling his virtues and his vices with 
the same impartial pen. Having leisure, and 
being taken with the itch of scribbling, he 
found himself "wholly unprovided of subject; 
and, void of other matter, I have presented 
myself unto myself for a subject to write and 
argument to descant upon. It is the only 
book in the world of this kind and of a wild 
extravagant design." The book, however, is 
much more than an autobiography, and his 
Essays deal with so many subjects of philosophy, 
art, and literature, his quaint imaginings 
explore so many realms of thought, his mind 
is busied with so many points and problems 
of life, that his work may be read and re-read 
with ever fresh delight, and with some mental 
and moral profit always to be got. His 
writings were "done into English" by John 

34 



WHICH MUST BE READ 

Florio in the reign of Elizabeth, and it is this 
translation which is most full of homely vigor 
and the grace of simple speech. 

Elizabethan Genius 

Bacon had not that flashing, brilliant wit of 
Montaigne. He did not skim lightly over 
many subjects, suggesting a thought, revealing 
an inspiration, exploring beyond the boundaries 
of mere reason, and leading his reader a will- 
o'-the-wisp dance through the thought-world; 
but Bacon had a profound genius, with little 
humor, but a piercing vision for the truth of 
things. His Essays led men's thoughts into 
new regions, and the modern world owes not a 
little of its civilization to his wise and pregnant 
utterances. His English, too, is stately and 
sober, simple but severe, clear and concise, 
so that those who wish to speak and write 
with grace should study his eloquent periods. 

On the Pilgrim's Way to Culture there must 
be a long halt when we come to Shakespeare's 
hospitable gifts. For he has been, and must 
always be, the one to whom all thinking minds 
turn for inspiration, for knowledge, and 
enchantment. Not to know his characters 
is to be ignorant of much in human nature, 
not to have heard his glorious verse is to be 
deaf to the beauty of language, for he was the 

35 



WHICH MUST BE READ 

master-mind who revealed the hidden secrets 
of the human heart, the poet who crystallized 
our language into its noblest form and moulded 
it to the expression of the sublimest thought. 

Remarkable Works 

I must not linger too long on this topic, and 
as in my next article I want to start from a new 
sign-post along the Pilgrim's Way, I will 
conclude with a brief mention of other books 
of vast influence upon mankind. 

The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis, 
is a wonderful picture of the perfect Christian 
life. It is an ideal which no doubt has never 
been reached by mortal man, but an ideal 
which points the way to a higher and nobler 
life than the ordinary slipshod course 'twixt 
birth and death. Thousands have obtained 
the deepest solace from the work, thousands 
have endeavored to base their conduct upon 
its teaching. Therefore, whether or not we 
disagree with its doctrine, its writings should 
be studied with reverence. 

Dante's Divine Comedy breathes out the 
spirit of medieval idealism, yet today, in this 
modern world, there are men whose heart- 
strings are vibrated by the deathless song of the 
thirteenth century bard as by no other writer 
of any age or nation. Dante himself is a 

36 



WHICH MUST BE READ 

character who stands out of the surrounding 
blackness of his age with a certain dazzling 
glamour. But, apart from this, his poem is 
profoundly impressive to the imagination; 
and though the lovely melody of the Italian 
tongue is largely lost in our harder English, 
in such a translation as Longfellow's (not the 
most accurate, but the most poetical) the 
Divine Comedy may be read with infinite 
delight and with that wondering and reveren- 
tial awe which is the key-note of its effect. 

The Arabian Nights lifts the curtain to a new 
realm of imagination, and casts a spell upon 
the reader, who, once having reveled in the 
Eastern glow of its pages, never loses the 
memory of its enchantment, nor quite escapes 
the haunting glamour of its adventures. Bun- 
yan's Pilgrim's Progress is another work that 
will not die. The English people would not be 
the same had it never been written, and to many 
a man and woman, since the tinker dreamed his 
dream, the wonderful allegory has been a solace 
in the hour of grief and despair, a warning in the 
hour of temptation, and a guide along the 
Pilgrim's Way to a Better Land. There is 
much in the book that is bigoted and anti- 
quated, but as a whole it still remains a monu- 
ment of genius. 



37 



FOURTH TURN 

The Reading of History 

The Value of Histoky 

The student with any pretension towards 
self-culture must set apart a fair amount of 
time to the study of history. Now, there are 
many young men and women who think there 
is a good deal of nonsense about this. They 
don't understand how it can profit them to 
grub up facts about old kings and queens, 
statesmen and soldiers, to say nothing of the 
people who are as dead as door nails (or, as 
Dickens said, "as dead as coffin nails"), with 
whom the modern world has no concern. 
Nevertheless, history must be studied by all 
who want to be " up-to-date." For what does 
that rather absurd but much beloved phrase 
mean? I take it that a person who has the 
good or bad fortune to live in this present 
year of grace is only worthy of his age if he 
realizes in more than a vague manner that he 
has nineteen centuries of the Christian era 
behind him, and, still farther back,- countless 
other eras. If a man does not know something 
of the lessons painfully worked out during the 

38 



READING OF HISTORY 

world's length of life, if he is so ignorant of 
history that instead of being able to draw upon 
the accumulated experience of the centuries, 
he has to blunder through from the beginning 
with no other experience than his own poor, 
petty life affords, then he is in no way "up-to- 
date," in no way a twentieth-century indi- 
vidual, but must date his existence from the 
Year 1. 

This I think is the true value of history. 
It enables us to regard modern problems with 
eyes that look backward as well as forward. 
This is how many would-be reformers and so- 
called politicians go hopelessly wrong. They 
don't know their history. They launch out into 
schemes, build up fine theories, institute far- 
reaching measures, which, had they but 
studied the annals of other ages, they would 
know to be futile or dangerous, because they 
run counter to human nature, to the laws of 
economic history, or to a nation's inherited 
character. 

This is not all that is to be got from the study 
of history. It is a great source of strength in 
the building of character, and not only strength, 
but breadth and refinement. A man is so 
hopelessly narrow if he is ignorant of history! 
He is like a horse in blinkers, looking only 
straight forward and seeing neither to right 

39 



READING OF HISTORY 

nor left. He is like a country bumpkin, be- 
fore the reign of newspapers, who with his back 
to the town pump laid down the law upon 
life in general and the town in particular. 

History is the interpreter of many phases of 
modern life that otherwise are hidden and have 
no meaning. It gives interest to much that 
would otherwise be dull, and throws a glamour 
of romance over much that would be common- 
place. The student of history has his eyes 
opened to a thousand little details of everyday 
life which go unnoticed by the uninitiated, but 
each of which to him suggests a delightful train 
of thought, stretching from now backward to 
past ages. The name of a street furnishes 
him with a text for a mental sermon, for it 
tells him perhaps that here (as at Giltspur 
Street, London) rode knights to the tourney 
in the smooth field (or Smithfield) in the age of 
chivalry. The names over the shop-doors 
remind him perhaps (as the French names at 
Canterbury) that here was a colony of thriving, 
skilful Huguenots, whom a silly king drove 
out of his country by a silly edict that sent his 
best men to a foreign foe. Walking over a 
field that is called Athelney he remembers that 
a certain king came to hide here during the 
dark days of his reign, and made it a strong- 
hold, from which he issued at length to defeat 

40 



READING OF HISTORY 

his country's enemies. A paragraph in a 
newspaper, telling how a bailiff seized all a 
debtor's goods but his tools, brings his mind 
back to a certain clause in Magna Charta 
which says that a man shall not be deprived 
of his means of livelihood nor of his implements 
of husbandry. 

The Education of Patriotism 

History is the best cultivator of true patriot- 
ism, for if we read of the long struggles by which 
the people had to establish their rights, when 
we realize that the liberties we now enjoy, and 
perhaps prize so lightly, cost the life's-blood of 
heroes and martyrs; when we remember the 
brave deeds done on American soil, the great 
hearts that have beat in our country's cause, 
the noble men and women who have lived and 
worked to make the nation sure — we feel a 
pride of race that has no meanness; and, if 
we have a spark of native fire, we make a secret 
resolution, not to let that name be dragged in 
the dirt of infamy. 

And history will temper this patriotism with 
a restraining influence, bidding us reverence 
the traditions of other nations, teaching us that 
patriotism should not be narrowing, and provin- 
cial, but should go hand in hand with the 
world-wide fellowship of common charity, not 

dl 



READING OF HISTORY 

judging every nation by our own standard, nor 
thinking that because a thing is American it is 
right, because it is foreign it is wrong, but 
rather giving us the desire to learn and profit 
from all that is best among other people in 
other lands, and to stamp out all that compares 
unfavorably in our owri national character. 

Apart from all this there is in history a 
source of immeasurable pleasure, of pure 
enjoyment, which none will realize but those 
who have delved into the annals of the past, 
who have let their imaginations roam in a 
certain period of history, who have become 
familiar with old-time characters, and lingered 
longingly over old-time speech, who, for no 
purely practical purpose, have built up in their 
minds a complete picture of the age, and taken 
fresh delight in hunting up every fact that will 
add a new detail to their knowledge. This 
kind of study, of course, may only be for those 
who have the leisure to pursue it; and for those 
who cannot linger over details, but must cover 
a wide ground speedily, I will now give a few 
general hints. 

American History 

Of course a student should begin by getting a 
knowledge of his own country's history, and 
there are many interesting volumes to draw 

42 



READING OF HISTORY 

upon, from Washington Irving's fanciful His- 
tory of New York to the serious works of 
Prescott, Motley, Bancroft, Parkman, Fiske, 
John Bach McMaster and Woodrow Wilson. 
It is a good plan for the student to take up 
certain epochs and phases of history and to 
study them separately, but he must never lose 
sight of the fact that there is an unbroken 
continuity of history and that no one may say 
here began and there ended a certain historical 
period. 

English History 

American history naturally leads back into 
English history, and as an elementary book, 
but one nevertheless which shows the glamour 
of history and teaches the intimate connection 
which the modern world has with the past, I 
recommend H. O. Arnold-Foster's History of 
England. John Richard Green's Short History 
of the English People is a work that should be 
read very early in one's historical course. It 
gets rid of that pernicious idea that history 
merely deals with kings and battles, with the 
bang of the big drum, and the record of glorious 
victories mingled with a few distressing defeats. 
Green traces the development of the people, 
and their gradual emancipation from barbarism 
to feudalism, from feudalism to freedom, telling 

43 



READING OF HISTORY 

in vivid chapters that have all the glow of 
romance the story of great movements, such as 
the struggle between Church and Crown, the 
rise of Parliament, and the growth of commerce. 
Macaulay and Froude are historians who wrote 
with a pen dipped in glowing colors, and for 
this reason they must be read with caution, the 
student keeping his judgment in check, nor 
allowing it to be carried away by the prejudice 
of the writers. Nevertheless, these two I have 
named, by their fire, their enthusiasm, their 
wonderful style, bring forth that infinite charm 
of history which throws a spell over the mind 
and leads one on to further study. 

Woeld-wide History 

Too much time should not be given to the 
history of the United States and Britain, the 
object of the student being to get a broad and 
comprehensive survey of every country and 
every age. It is necessary to get away from 
the habit of regarding one's country as the 
center of the universe, by studying the rise of 
new nations with new ideals and new-born 
energy. The student should take the history of 
the world on broad lines, tracing the rise and fall 
of empires, the intermingling of races and their 
division into nations, the great invasions from 
east to west, the gradual emergence from 

44 



READING OF HISTORY 

barbarism to civilization, the great centers of 
the world's trades, the early republics and 
commonwealths, thestory of ancient Greece and 
Rome, of medieval Venice, of modern Europe, 
of the old-world East and the new-world West. 

The Old Chronicleks 

I always advocate that students of history 
should do some reading of original authorities. 
For instance, the brief and terse narrative of 
the Saxon Chronicles is deeply interesting as 
being the actual contemporary record of the 
events occurring during the reigns of the 
Saxon kings. The Chronicle of Ingulph, 
though partly discredited, contains much that 
is authentic and valuable, and narrates in a 
graphic and detailed manner one of the most 
splendid though almost forgotten episodes of 
early English history, the last stand of Earl 
Algar and a band of Saxon nobles against the 
overwhelming hordes of Danes. Walsingham 
is the best authority for the period of the Black 
Death and Peasants' War and the Chronicles 
of Holinshed (compiled by various writers) were 
the source from which Shakespeare learned 
all his history and the authorities he followed 
with absolute fidelity in his great historical 
plays, from King John to Henry VIII. Frois- 
sart, too, is worth reading diligently, and to 

45 



READING OF HISTORY 

study his writings is pure enjoyment, for he was, 
par excellence, the chronicler of chivalry, and 
his pages are aglow with daring deeds, of 
gallant tourneys, of hard-fought skirmishes and 
long-resisted sieges, of sorties and encounters 
in which the flowers of knighthood displayed 
their prowess, when such sturdy war-dogs as 
Chandos and Talbot on the one side faced 
such doughty champions as Du Guesclin and 
Montmorency on the other. 

Economic History 

If students have time to devote to this 
subject, there is a valuable and fascinating 
field of study to be pursued in economic 
history. It was Thorold Rogers who first 
directed historians to this important branch 
of their science. His great work, The History 
of Agriculture and Prices, and his Economic 
Interpretation of History, paved the way for a 
new method of investigation which would 
throw much light upon the most interesting 
periods of history. Economic history deals 
with subjects which to some may appear at 
first sight unworthy of attention from histori- 
ans, the laws relating to food and material 
welfare, the fluctuations of national resources, 
and the supply and demand of national commod- 
ities. Yet such investigation is most valuable 

46 



READING OF HISTORY 

in the interpretation of the forces underlying 
great epochs or incidents of history; and in the 
development or decline of agriculture and 
industry, one may realize most clearly the 
absolute continuity of history and the causes 
which contribute to the power or weakness, the 
prosperity or downfall of nations. 

Finally, I would say that to stimulate the 
imagination and to appreciate to the full the 
delight of getting in touch with the past, 
frequent visits to museums and libraries are 
very necessary, so that one may actually see 
with one's own eyes the arms and armor, the 
domestic utensils and ornaments, the coins, 
dresses, and documents which were handled 
by the men and women of long ago. In the 
same way visits to historic buildings and places 
impress upon one's mind the actuality of the 
things about which one has been reading, and 
build up in one's imagination a true picture 
of the past. Helpful also to a high degree are 
the collections of portraits in our great galler- 
ies, where one may study the " living images" 
of the men and women who played big parts 
in our country's history. To the student who 
studies history in such a way, using his intelli- 
gence, his imagination and his judgment, it is 
a subject of life-long charm and of immeasur- 
able value in the direction of true culture. 

47 



FIFTH TURN 
The Highway of English Literature 

The wayfarer who sets out on the journey 
to culture must realize that it is a long road, 
and not to be traversed at post haste. But 
I warrant there are few ways so pleasant, or so 
fragrant with choice flowers, as the Highway 
of English Literature. And those who walk 
there shall meet companions who will become 
life-long friends, men and women of golden 
speech, and thoughts that like the morning 
sun reveal the beauty of nature, and pierce the 
mists that conceal the wonders and the glories 
of God and man. 

English literature should be studied not in 
parts, disconnected, fragmentary, but as one 
great whole, having its beginnings in the first 
minstrel notes of Saxon singers, getting strength 
and volume as the ages pass, one generation 
inspired by its forerunner, and itself inspiring 
that which follows; embodying the spirit of 
the time, and passing from one phase of 
thought to another phase evolved from it — 
the sober, staid Saxon merging into the more 

48 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

flexible, nervous English; and crystallizing 
into imperishable language the wisdom learned 
by a nation's lessons in life, by a nation's 
groping into the mysteries of life, purged and 
transfused through the travailing of soul of the 
nation's singers and writers. 

The Earliest Writers 

Let us start with Cadmon, the first Saxon 
singer, whose songs have come down to us 
through Time — he, the farm-hand of Whitby, 
who was shamed before his fellows because at 
the board, when the harp was handed round, 
alone of all the company he knew no songs of 
Thor and Wodin, those old pagan gods who 
still kept their places in the hearts of his 
countrymen, though they professed the faith 
of Christ. In the stable that night, where he 
kept watch, his thoughts turned to the glory 
of the true God, and in his heart the thought 
came to him that he perhaps could sing a song 
of praise to the Creator of all things. So, 
saying no word to anyone, he put into verse 
those Bible stories told him by the Abbess 
Hilda and her students; and when at length, 
half-ashamed and wholly doubting, he recited 
his poem of the "Creation of the World," those 
who heard him hailed him as a man who had 
received a gift of song from God, and the 

49 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Abbess Hilda invited him to live in the religious 
house, where his time might be well spent in 
singing still further of the Bible story. Very- 
grand and stately is Csedmon's poem, and 
though few may understand it in its old Saxon, 
there are plain English renderings which all 
may read and enjoy. After Caedmon came 
Bede, called the Venerable, who spent his life 
in the Monastery of Jarrow, and there acquired 
a great fame as a teacher, so that from all parts 
of the kingdom came scholars to sit at his feet, 
eager to learn about the laws of Nature and 
the history of the world. Bede delved deep 
into Latin literature, which was then the key to 
knowledge, and he added to his learning a keen 
observation of the world as he found it. He 
it was who compiled the first English text-book 
of natural science; but the greatest of his 
works was his Ecclesiastical History of the 
English People, which was in reality the first 
History of England. This great writer was 
followed by Aldhelm, who wrote sacred songs, 
and sang them to his harping on bridges and in 
public ways, so that the people should stop to 
listen and get "health to their minds." Greater 
than he was Alfred, who translated many 
Latin books into the English (or Saxon) tongue, 
among others being the work of Boethius, The 
Consolations of Philosophy. 

50 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

The Age of Chaucer 

Geoffrey Chaucer was one of the first writers 
of English after it had emerged from the rugged 
but virile Saxon, and had taken to itself a new 
vocabulary and a new grace from the Norman 
French. Chaucer was a type of all that was 
best in the England of that day, an open-eyed, 
hearty, cheerful soul, with a hatred of sham 
and cant, and a love of manliness, and of Dame 
Nature who breeds such manliness. His quick 
eyes took in all the foibles of the time, and if 
we would know how our fourteenth-century 
forefathers thought and talked and worked, 
if we would roam in that medieval world where 
romance jostled with coarse commonplace, 
and high ideals rubbed shoulders with low 
manners, when chivalry was next-door neigh- 
bor to knavery, and when human nature was 
much as it is now, save that there were less 
checks upon the hand and tongue, and civiliza- 
tion was nearer to semi-barbarism — then read 
the Canterbury Tales, which reflect a true 
image of the time in all its details. Chaucer, 
though incomparable, was not the only poet 
of his age; and William Langland, in his Vision 
of Piers Plowman, upheld the honors of the 
English tongue, and left a work of true and 
pregnant genius. John Wyclif, who also 
lived at this time, did for English prose what 

51 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Chaucer had done for English poetry, and 
students would do well to read some of his 
sober, stately writing, which is the precursor of 
the wonderful grandeur of sound and rhythm, 
known to all of us in the English Bible. Sir 
John Mandeville is another great prose writer 
of this time, and his famous volume of Travels, 
which was the book best beloved by the readers 
of those days, is an excellent example of old 
English. 

Sir Thomas More's beautiful dream of 
Utopia is the best prose work of the early 
sixteenth century, and it is a pleasant thing 
to think that it is as popular today as when it 
first delighted and astonished the reading 
world. 

The Elizabethan Period 

The Elizabethan Period was the Golden Age 
of English Literature. All students should 
read Shakespeare's Predecessors, by J. A. 
Symonds, in which one may learn how even 
Shakespeare himself , great sun amidst attendant 
stars, did not rise in solitary glory, but gained 
inspiration, knowledge, method, from men who 
had come before him, and left to him their 
heritage of work. His work rises immeasurably 
higher than the highest among a cluster of 
contemporary giants, and there is no need for 

52 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

me to add more words here. But there are 
other splendid names, which glitter in a noble 
galaxy — among them Spenser, whose Faerie 
Queene is the most beautiful allegory in 
medieval literature — men who made the Eng- 
lish stage the school of thought, manners and 
imagination, where the people went to see 
popular foibles parodied, to see the nation's 
history enacted on the narrow compass of a 
stage, and the many phases of human nature 
depicted for their entertainment and instruc- 
tion. Here, too, the sonorous roll of blank verse 
tuned their ears to the witchery of rhythm, and 
art, improving on nature, lifted men's hearts to 
higher ideals, and broadened them with wider 
aims. 

The Elizabethan Age was quick with life. 
The veil had but shortly been lifted from the 
New World, and the spirit of adventure, of 
conquest and daring breathed fresh health into 
the souls of men. England was in a lusty 
young manhood. Her children had wandered 
far into new seas, and brought back tales of 
wondrous lands, of wealth and beauty past the 
bounds of thought. Life's everyday world was 
tinged with the glamour of romance, and hearts 
beat high with great ambitions, while minds 
were filled with bright fantastic dreams. All 
this is reflected in the literature of the period. 

53 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

In Raleigh's stirring prose and tuneful lyrics, 
in Sydney's pastorals, in Wotton's love-songs, 
in Wyatt's and Surrey's sonnets, in the plays of 
the Elizabethan dramatists, in the stories of 
Lodge and Lyly, in Bacon's new philosophy, 
this spirit of the New World of romance and 
fantasy and gallantry animates and pervades 
all their work, and gives it an atmosphere of 
its own to which no other period of English 
literature may be likened. 

Sttjakt and Hanover 

In the following reigns of James and Charles 
the glories of Elizabeth were not maintained, 
though there are a few sweet singers, such as 
pious George Herbert whose quaint and pure 
thoughts are like some bubbling fountain in a 
cloister garden. Robert Herrick, too, has left 
us some ballads which have perennial charm 
and sweetness, while gay and profligate Sedley 
and Rochester have given us some gallant 
love-songs that reveal perhaps more sentiment 
than true passion. In the seventeenth century 
one great name marks a new epoch in literature, 
the name of John Milton, whose mighty verse 
rolls sonorous and solemn like glorious organ 
music, and whose sublime thoughts lift one a 
little nearer to the heavens, a little farther 
from the earth. His mind was steeped in 

54 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

classic lore, and he first gave to the English 
language the chaste and chiseled grace of 
Latin verse. Nothing in our literature is more 
beautiful than his elegiac poem of Lycidas, 
nothing more sadly sweet than his II Penseroso, 
nothing more joyous than L' Allegro, nothing 
more sublime than his immortal epic Paradise 
Lost. 

Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy 
Dying were great prose works that bring 
English literature to the opening of the eight- 
eenth century. During an almost barren 
period Dryden was the one great poet, and 
though he had not that divine afflatus which is 
the spirit of high poetic genius, he had stately 
polished grace, a classic culture, and restrained 
fancy, which gives a worthy rank to his work 
in the great body of our literature. In this 
century was the rise of the English topical 
essay, the forerunner of the novel. Steele and 
Addison entered into a partnership that 
brought delight into every cultured English 
home, and among their bright, witty and 
eloquent papers in The Spectator and The 
Tatler there are many worthy of being learned 
by heart for their purity of style and elegance 
of thought. To this period belong Swift's 
masterpiece of imagination and satire, Gulliver's 
Travels, and Goldsmith's beautiful, wise, and 

55 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

humorous prose drama of English home life, 
The Vicar of Wakefield, as well as his delightful 
poems and plays, The Deserted Village, The 
Traveller, The Good-Natured Man, and the still 
popular She Stoops to Conquer. Nor must I 
forget to mention the world-famous Robinson 
Crusoe of Daniel Defoe. 

In the middle of the eighteenth century 
Richardson wrote his novel Pamela, which, in 
spite of its sickly sentiment, gave the reading 
public a craving for fiction dealing with contem- 
porary manners and life. Fielding eclipsed 
Richardson by his Joseph Andrews and Tom 
Jones, two of the greatest masterpieces of 
literature, though tainted by the contemporary 
coarseness of humor and freedom of speech. 
Then Smollett came into the field with Roderick 
Random and Peregrine Pickle, and these three 
novelists were the originals from which Thack- 
eray, Lytton, Dickens, and many authors of 
lesser note drew their inspiration, and which 
they made their models. 

Alexander Pope 

In poetry the early eighteenth century was a 
period of stagnation, in which all freedom of 
fancy and naturalness of language were 
blighted by the artificial influence of the French 
school. The man who led the way back to 

56 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

nature was Alexander Pope, who learned his 
vocation so soon that he said of himself — 

"As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, 
I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." 

Spenser's Faerie Queene was his constant 
companion as a child, and while yet a boy he 
made imitations of this and other early English 
poets. In his great poem, the Essay on 
Criticism, written in 1709, he attacked the 
deadening influence of French conventionality, 
declaring that Nature is the mistress of poetry 
and that 

"Life, force and beauty must to all impart 
At once the source and end, and test of art." 

Among his most famous works are the Essay on 
Man and his translation of the Iliad and Odys- 
sey of Homer. There are few poets who had a 
greater genius for putting a pregnant thought 
into terse and lucid language, and, as a conse- 
quence, there are few from whom so many 
quotations have grown into the language. 

Burns, Johnson, and Later Writers 

Towards the end of that century came Robert 
Burns, who, like Shakespeare, "warbled his 
native wood notes wild," and whose songs 
breathe forth the very spirit of nature. Wil- 

57 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Ham Cowper also has an honorable niche in the 
"poet's corner" as author (among other good 
works) of that dear soul John Gilpin, who, as 
Johnson said of Garrick, added to the gaiety 
of nations. 

Dr. Johnson, who wielded a profound 
influence upon his time, is notable nowadays 
not so much for his own writings, which though 
sonorous, eloquent, and learned, have not 
much living interest, but for his conversations 
as recorded by Boswell, his faithful friend and 
scribe. 

In the nineteenth century we reach another 
Golden Age of poetry, so rich in melodious 
singers that to enumerate their names would 
fill many lines, and among whom I will now only 
mention Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Coleridge, 
William Wordsworth, Thomas Campbell, 
Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe 
Shelley, John Keats, Thomas Hood, Robert 
Browning and his wife, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
and Alfred Tennyson. 

To this period belongs also the luxuriance 
of the English novel, which I am taking as a 
special subject later on in this book. 

LITERATURE IN AMERICA 

The eighteenth century in America saw the 
works of Jonathan Edwards, the Journal of 

58 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the Quaker, John Woolman, which delighted 
Charles Lamb, and the Autobiography of 
Benjamin Franklin, a better representative 
of the prevalent temper of the colonies, filled 
with shrewd wisdom. 

Early in the nineteenth century appeared 
the first works of Washington Irving, who has 
been called the " Father of American Litera- 
ture," and who was the first American writer 
to receive serious recognition abroad. To 
those who enjoy a finished style and lambent, 
genial humor, Irving is still one of the most 
delightful of all essayists. The Spy, first of the 
novels of James Fenimore Cooper, was pub- 
lished in 1821. It laid the foundation for a 
new literature for the new country by showing 
the romance which attaches to the pioneer and 
to the Indian. Cooper, however, belonged 
in spirit more to the eighteenth century than 
to the nineteenth, and it was not until about 
1838 that American literature came into its 
own. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe, 
Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes all belong 
to this brilliant period, while the latter half of 
the nineteenth century saw the work of the 
masterful poet of democracy, Walt Whitman, 
and of at least two world-famous novelists — 
Henry James and William Dean Howells. 
Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) holds a 

59 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

unique and unquestioned place as a humorist, 
and there are many others worthy to appear 
on the bookshelves of him who would know 
and love the best in literature. 



60 



SIXTH TURN 

The Influence of Poetry 

I am afraid that the love of poetry is losing 
its grip of people's hearts, and that the ten- 
dency nowadays is to look upon our great 
heritage of national verse as something quite 
suitable for school misses and young curates, 
but wholly unprofitable and trifling for men and 
women who take life seriously. There are, of 
course, a certain number of quiet souls who go 
to poetry for recreation and consolation; there 
are also a number of literary persons who study 
the poets in a professional way; but I think it 
is a fact, at least so far as my own observation 
goes, that among the great bulk of people there 
are few who read, and less who learn by heart, 
the lovely thoughts enshrined in lovely lan- 
guage by the poets of our own and other 
nations. 

The Groves that the Muse Haunts 

And yet now, above all times, it is fitting 
that we should read poetry, and learn poetry. 
For in the toil and stress of the modern world 
men's thoughts and aspirations are apt to be 
wholly sordid, or at least wholly material. 

61 



INFLUENCE OF POETRY 

The competition of the time is keen, and, in the 
struggle, men and women have little opportun- 
ity for cultivating the softer, more imaginative 
side of nature. Then, again, life has become 
more complicated — not with deeper problems, 
but rather with a myriad trivialities of time- 
filling and time-wasting. Nowadays, too, we 
are more gregarious. The rush from the land 
to the great cities — dense hives of human beings 
brought into intimate contact by work and 
pleasure — has taken away a good deal of the 
souPs loneliness, and therefore a good deal of 
its poetry. For true poetry is rarely found in 
a crowd. The poet must retire apart to 
commune with his own soul, to gaze from afar 
at human strife. In the drawing-room filled 
with the lightest of chatter, in the restaurant 
with the loud banter of business men, in the 
music-hall with the swish of ballet girls' skirts 
and the snigger of light-headed fops, the Muse 
of Poetry does not come, but enters only the 
silent room where the solitary student sits 
at his desk, or whispers in the ear of him who 
paces the lonely path with but earth and sky 
and wind beneath, above, and around him. 

The Song and the Deed 

The training of the modern world tends to 
make us hard, practical, skeptical of all senti- 

62 



INFLUENCE OF POETRY 

ment, still more of sentiment bordering on 
emotion. There has come a spirit of cynicism 
over the world, something too of the old 
stoicism, which prefers to shrug shoulders at 
evil and virtue, to laugh at ideals, to jeer at 
beauty of thought and phrase. "A fig for 
beauty," says our friend the "man in the 
street," "give me utility. We can't make the 
nation pay on principles of poetry and such like 
humbug." 

And yet the man is wrong. It is precisely 
on the principles of national poetry that great 
nations have been built up. For the poets 
have been the source of inspiration that has 
filled the hearts of the people. Their words 
have nerved the people's right arms to do the 
work of civilization and nation-building. By 
the enthusiasm kindled through their fiery 
eloquence the people have pressed onward, by 
the laws laid down in ballad and lyric the 
people have moulded their characters, by the 
sentiment sung by the nation's singers the 
people have tuned their hearts. Poetry is 
indeed the voice of the nation's heart. The 
poetry of every age sums up the spirit of that 
age. Here we find the wisdom, the philosophy, 
and the prophecy of the time. In our national 
poetry we find our national ideals. 

Does not gay Richard Lovelace, in his love- 

63 



INFLUENCE OF POETRY 

song to Lucasta, give us the ideals of love and 
honor which governed the chivalry of his age 
and nation? 

"Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind, 
That from the nunnery 
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind 
To war and arms I fly. 

True, a new mistress now I chase — 

The first foe in the field; 
And with a stronger love embrace 

A sword, a horse, a shield. 

Yet this inconstancy is such 

As you, too, shall adore: 
I could not love thee, dear, so much, 

Loved I not honor more." 

There in those two lines is expressed the 
ideal of an age when a knight had to tear 
himself from love's embraces to the sterner 
duties of the field. 

Our National Heritage 

So if we would know what animated our 
forefathers, from what standpoint they looked 
at life and the duties of life, we must go to the 
poetry which they have left as a heritage. 
Here is enshrined the wisdom of our race— a 
wisdom learned through hard toil, hard 
fighting, hard suffering; a wisdom worked out 

64 



INFLUENCE OF POETRY 

by a people's accumulated experience, passing 
through the glowing heart of one ardent soul, 
crystallized into language on the poet's lips. 

More than mere worldly wisdom do we find 
in poetry. The poets have been the inter- 
preters between man and nature, between the 
world visible and invisible. Nowadays most 
people think they need no interpreter, that 
life has no riddle, and that all is as plain as a 
pikestaff. And yet it is because their eyes 
are too dull to see more than the material 
world around them, because they do not stop 
to think of the secrets, the mysteries, the 
eternal problems that confront us every day. 

But to the poet everything in nature is a 
cause of wonderment and study. Life itself 
is a great secret which he must forever explore. 
The human heart with all its passions is an 
instrument on which he plays every chord; 
with an ever-varying harmony he follows the 
human brain as it soars into flights beyond the 
realm of mere thought; and so, 

"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to 

heaven: 
And, as imagination bodies forth 
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name." 

65 



INFLUENCE OF POETRY 

The Things that Matter 

In poetry we find the broad, elemental 
principles of life. The trivial, the artificial, the 
conventional, the whole atmosphere of modern 
shoddiness, vulgarity and superficiality, is 
stripped off, and the naked soul remains 
unfettered in the nature-world. For this 
reason is it so necessary that we men and 
women of today should drink deep at the 
fount of poetry. For we must not fritter away 
our souls upon things of no account. We must 
get face to face with the problems of life, and 
wrestle out their solution at all costs. We 
must — unless we would descend in the scale — 
find out the things that matter and the things 
that don't matter. ^It does not matter, for 
instance, if I gain the whole world, and lose 
my own soul. It does not matter if I know 
all the science of mathematics, and yet am 
ignorant of my own heart. It does not matter 
if I lead my nation to world supremacy, if it is 
at the cost of its honor and moral sense. But 
the things that do matter, these we learn in 
poetry. We find the meaning of Life and 
Death, of Truth and Love, of Hope and 
Joy and Despair, of beauty in man and 
nature, of all those whisperings of another 
world which lead men on with courage and 
hope through the fight of life to the crown 

66 



INFLUENCE OF POETRY 

of peace. All this have poets told, for they 
are the Truth-tellers. 

The Spirit of Poetry 

Apart from the high philosophy which those 
who know how may learn from poetry, we may 
all get illimitable benefit from the reading of 
the poets. Poetry gives the sweetness and 
tenderness to one's character without which 
one is hard and unsympathetic. It teaches 
charity and simplicity, faith and honor, good 
fellowship and friendliness, love of beauty in 
form and sound and color, in character and 
speech. From poetry we may learn to be 
contented with little, to prefer a peaceful 
mind to the uncertainty of wealth and fame. 
What does old Sir Henry Wotton say? 

"How happy is he born and taught 
That serveth not another's will, 
Whose armor is his honest thought 
And simple truth his utmost skill! 

Whose passions not his masters are, 
Whose soul is still prepared for death, 

Untied unto the world by care 
Of public fame or private breath. 

Who envies none that chance doth raise, 

Nor vice hath ever understood; 
How deepest wounds are given by praise, 

Nor rules of state, but rules of God. 

67 



INFLUENCE OF POETRY 

Who hath his life from rumors freed, 
Whose conscience is his strong retreat, 

Whose state can neither flatterers feed 
Nor ruin make oppressors great. 



Who God doth late and early pray 
More of His grace than gifts to lend, 

Who entertains the harmless day 
With a religious book or friend. 



This man is freed from servile bonds 
Of hope to rise or fear to fall; 

Lord of himself though not of lands, 
And having nothing, yet hath all." 



After a day's work, perhaps in uncongenial 
surroundings, perhaps among people of vulgar 
thoughts and vulgar speech, busy with work 
that has in it nothing nobler, purer, or more 
elevating than that it is work, it is an excellent 
thing to read a little poetry of an evening, and 
to refresh one's jaded soul with the melody 
of rhythmic language wedded to bright fancy. 
The dust of the day falls from one's spirit, 
cleansed in the pure stream of poetry; and all 
things commonplace, sordid, trivial, ugly, are 
left behind for the realm of thoughts ethereal, 
ennobling, solacious. 

68 



INFLUENCE OF POETRY 

"Ever let the Fancy roam, 
Pleasure never is at home. 
At a touch sweet pleasure melteth 
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth; 



Then let wing&d Fancy wander, 

Though the thought still spread beyond her. 

Open wide the mind's cage-door, 

She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar!" 



69 



SEVENTH TURN 

The Education of Art 

The Origin of Art 

Art is as necessary to mankind as social laws 
or physical requirements. In the very earliest 
stages of man's progress to civilization, in the 
most primitive races now existing in the world, 
art is to be found in its origin and elementary 
state. It is in its simplest form the outward 
expression of the soul's emotions. Painting, 
sculpture, singing, music of every kind, dancing, 
and even a certain kind of literature, first had 
their use in relieving the pent-up feelings of 
man, according as he was actuated by love, 
joy, fear, or religious emotion. Love was the 
greatest charm that led men to cultivate all 
forms of what we call art. The desire to please 
the women-folk was the spur that drove the 
first artists onward in search of beauty of form 
and sound and color. We have but to study 
the habits of birds and beasts to see to what 
purpose they exercise the art. We shall find 
that the nightingale, king of carolers, pours 
out its ecstasy of quivering song to woo the 
timid listening female in the thicket. We shall 

70 



EDUCATION OF ART 

find that the fine plumage of cock-birds 
exercises much the same influence upon the 
female breasts of the feathered flirts as a 
well-cut coat and immaculate trousers do 
among the ladies of a higher creation, and with 
more justification. So students of savage 
tribes find that art is cultivated for the same 
purpose; and the young chief adorns his black 
body with artistic tattoo designs, learns the 
music of the tom-tom, and practices intricate 
dance-steps (all various kinds of art) in order 
to win the graces of some dusky bride. Religious 
emotion stimulates art in a similar and almost 
as influential a way; the first rude sketches on 
rocks, the first rough carvings in stone or 
wood, the first paintings in crude color, being 
to represent the wild man's conception of the 
deity or deities, who in some dim way he feels 
must control the wondrous workings of the 
world around him. This is not a theory but a 
scientific fact, and I need not carry the thought 
further than to explain that as in the earliest 
stages of humanity art is an expression of every 
kind of emotion, so as mankind progresses in 
knowledge and intellect, and refinement of 
sensation, art also progresses, and, from 
expressing the great primary and elemental 
emotions, gives expression now to the highest 
conceptions, the most delicate and subtle 

71 



EDUCATION OF ART 

forms of emotion, and the most various and 
multitudinous phases of imagination (which is 
an outcome of emotion) of which the human 
civilized mind is capable. 

The Influence of Emotion 

Therefore, when this is admitted, it will at 
once be seen what a powerful influence art 
must have towards the highest forms of culture. 
For one of the essential elements of true culture 
is the education of the mind and the refinement 
of the mind, so that it shall be in harmony with 
and respond to the noblest emotions of noble 
souls. Some people may object to the word 
emotion, and say, "give me intellect, cold and 
clear and practical, unbiased by such a false, 
fickle thing as that." But this is to ignore the 
attributes of human nature, to leave out of one's 
calculation the fact that our emotional feelings 
are the source of all imagination, and of many 
of the most glorious ideals of beauty that are 
the light and joy of an otherwise gloomy world. 

The man, therefore, who wishes to gain a 
broad culture must not by any means ignore 
art. Fortunate is he if he lives in a town where 
there is a good art gallery, and wise is he if 
(unlike too many swine before whom pearls 
are scattered) he avails himself of it to its full 
extent. 

72 



EDUCATION OF ART 

Painting is, of course, one of the most 
important branches of art, and the one which 
requires least special training to appreciate 
and to be influenced by. 

The Art or North and South 

I will not take up space over the earliest 
forms of art — Assyrian, Egyptian, etc., which, 
though interesting to students of archaeology, 
need not occupy us now. Let us begin with 
that period of the Middle Ages when painting 
began to make glorious progress. In the 
sixteenth century painting was broadly divided 
into two schools or influences, the Northern 
and the Southern — the Germans and Dutch 
being the apostles of the first, and the Italians 
of the second. From these two influences 
modern art evolved, and their characteristics 
were well defined and widely various. Broadly 
speaking, it was all a question of light. In the 
South, where the sun's rays always shine with 
a genial constancy, bright light is an accepted 
thing, and artists strove indeed to minimize 
it, or ignored it by concentrating their endeav- 
ors upon form and simple color schemes, and 
they let their imagination rove into the realms 
of fancy unhampered by the desire to vie with 
the brilliancy of nature in the use of their 
pigments. But in the North it was different. 

73 



EDUCATION OF ART 

There the gloomy skies and the preponderance 
of indoor life induced the painters to put upon 
their canvas the most glowing colors and the 
most skilful effects of light, so that their 
pictures might be like choice gems for the 
decoration of the rooms. This was the chief 
cause of the essentially different characteristics 
between the Italian and the German and Dutch 
schools. The Southerners were idealists, 
expressing great conceptions and imaginative 
visions ; the Northerners were content to lavish 
their artistic skill upon reproductions of the 
domestic scenes and of the homely nature 
in which they lived. 

The Fiest Oil Painters 

The genius of the Italian painters was suited 
to the process called fresco, a certain technical 
manner of mural painting; and in this medium 
the early masters, Cimabue, Giotto, and, later, 
Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da 
Vinci produced many great works. It was to 
two Northern painters that the honor is due 
of discovering the process called oil-painting — 
the brothers Hubert and John Van Eyck. They 
proved how in every way it possessed great 
advantages over the processes hitherto in 
vogue, a greater depth, luminosity and variety 
of color being obtainable, besides the 

74 



EDUCATION OF ART 

immensely valuable quality of allowing an 
almost unlimited means of altering, retouching, 
and perfecting, instead of the rapidity neces- 
sary in such a process as fresco. From the two 
Flemings the secret was carried to Flanders 
and Italy, and during the first half of the 
sixteenth century oil painting was firmly 
established. Raphael adopted it, and his 
genius showed the marvelous heights of beauty 
and power which it might be made to express. 
Bellini was less gifted, but handed down the 
tradition to Titian, whose sublime genius still 
lives in works which modern painters study 
with loving admiration, copy with reverent 
care, but cannot equal either in perfection of 
color, in majesty of conception, or consummate 
mastery of technique. Giorgione is another 
great name that is one of the glories of the 
Italian school. The Flemish painter Rubens 
and the Spanish Velasquez, each in their 
way, produced paintings of unrivaled power; 
and the Dutch school, among whom are 
the renowned names of Teniers, Matsys, 
Maas, and Peter de Hooch (to mention 
but a few), excelled in the production 
of works of art in which mastery of tech- 
nique was almost as admirable as the 
soaring imagination of their Italian contem- 
poraries. 

75 



EDUCATION OF ART 

The English School of Painting 

There was practically no English school of 
painting until the reign of Charles I who was 
the most gifted royal patron, and who had the 
good taste and the good sense to attract to 
his country foreign painters of high repute to 
be a source of inspiration to national artists. 
Vandyck was the greatest among them, and 
they were followed by the brilliant but less 
worthy painter Sir Peter Lely. Hogarth was 
the first great original English painter, and 
he was largely influenced by the Dutch school 
but worked out his own line and developed 
his art in his own manner. Sir Joshua Reynolds 
was a disciple of the Italian school, a painter 
who believed in tradition and set himself the 
task of importing and giving to his Englisn 
models the grace and dignity and glamour that 
are the characteristics of the school from which 
he drew his inspiration. Gainsborough believed 
less in tradition and more in studying direct 
from nature. He was greater than Reynolds 
because more truthful. He dki not strive 
to embellish his portraits with his own fancy, 
but to draw out from them all that was best, 
beautiful, and sympathetic in themselves. 
In the National Gallery of London there is a 
group of pictures by Gainsborough that are 
unsurpassed in charm and truthfulness. To 

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EDUCATION OF ART 

study them is to understand what art means 
when genius is behind it, and one looks not 
merely at the outer mask of his models, but into 
the souls beaming from their eyes. Turner 
cast aside all rules, all fetters of tradition and 
conventionality. He was the first of impres- 
sionists, and strove to put upon his canvas, 
not the reproduction of things that are, but of 
things as we see them, or at least, as he saw 
them. He was not only a painter but a poet, 
not a realist but an idealist. He could see 
beauty where others would only see ugliness. 
He put into his pictures the wonders of light 
and atmosphere which pass by unnoticed by 
those who look out of keen but unspiritual eyes. 
Constable, on the contrary, was content with 
nature as he found it, and as it was, without 
putting into it his own spirituality. He loved 
a homely English scene and painted it with 
Dutch fidelity, but with a freshness and 
originality all his own. He founded a school of 
landscape painters which has had its following 
of disciples stretching from his time to our own, 
and the French painters drew their inspiration 
from him for their own school of rustic art. 

The Pre-Raphaelites 

For a time France became the center of the 
art world, and British painters went there for 

77 



EDUCATION OF ART 

their training. But the famous Pre-Raphaelite 
Brotherhood, originated by Rossetti under the 
influence of, though not in partnership with, 
Ford Madox Brown, rescued British art from 
a fatal tendency to mere prettiness and mere- 
tricious flashiness. The Pre-Raphaelites en- 
deavored to apply to modern painting the 
principles of the early masters, that is, the 
principles of truthfulness and fidelity to 
nature. Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Ros- 
setti, Millais, and Burne-Jones, were founders 
of this new school; and although at the time 
of its origin they and their art were treated by 
the most heated abuse from critics, painters, 
and the public, they were soon joined by 
numerous brilliant disciples, and exercised a 
profound influence upon modern art in this 
country and abroad. Millais himself came 
to see that to adhere rigidly to all the tenets of 
the "Brotherhood" was to impose voluntarily 
limitations upon his genius, and to ignore the 
lessons of time. He therefore emancipated 
himself from its fetters, but maintained all 
that was truest and best in its doctrine. He 
was followed by other disciples of the " Brother- 
hood"; but, in spite of its decline, the influence 
of the Pre-Raphaelite school is still to be seen 
in the works of many of the best English 
painters. 

78 



EDUCATION OF ART 

Painting in America 

American painting at the present day follows 
no school, and is infinitely various in its motive 
and treatment. Outside of the brilliant work 
of Sargent and Whistler, however, it is in the 
newer and wider fields of landscape painting 
and mural decoration that we have done most. 
Unfortunately we are not as a nation artistic, 
and there are only a select few who care to 
spend a leisure hour once or twice a week 
in the study of pictures, even when a great 
public gallery containing some of the world's 
masterpieces stands in their way with open 
doors. Foreigners come to gaze with awe at 
the glorious works, while those who possess 
them as a national heritage, pass by with care- 
less indifference. 

Pictures are not only a source of immense 
enjoyment to those who, having eyes, see, but 
they stimulate the imagination and lead the 
soul to high realms of spiritual beauty, giving 
one new ideals, new conceptions of nature, 
lifting the veil from the mysteries of light and 
atmosphere, and filling one with the most 
delicate emotions that exquisite color and 
divine form give to the man whose mind has 
been trained to receive them and to respond to 
them. 



79 



EIGHTH TURN 

The Charm of Music 

We have it on the authority of Shakespeare, 
through the mouth of his character Lorenzo, 
that 

"The man who hath no music in himself, 
Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds, 
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils: 
The motions of his spirit are dull as night, 
And his affections dark as Erebus: 
Let no such man be trusted." 

This is no doubt an exaggerated view of the 
influence of music upon men's character, and 
I would not advocate, nor would Shakespeare 
have advocated, in a strictly literal sense, that 
a man without an ear for music should be tried 
before a jury of twelve honorable citizens and 
"taken to the place whence he came and there 
hanged by the neck till he die." 

Its Psychological Aspect 

Nor can it be said even that music always 
has an elevating effect upon the character, for 
it is lamentably true that some of the finest 

80 



CHARM OF MUSIC 

musicians have been men and women wholly 
lacking in moral strength. It must not be 
thought that music, even of the grandest kind, 
appeals only to man's intellect and soul. On 
the contrary, music is primarily sensuous, and 
stirs the emotions, and even the passions. It 
satisfies a natural craving for rhythmical 
sound. We hear it in its first elementary form 
in the beating of a tom-tom, or the tattoo of a 
drum, which has a stimulating effect upon the 
martial ardor of its audience. We may also 
recognize this inborn delight in rhythm in a 
little child, who at the sound of a piano-organ, 
or any instrument, will begin to kick up its 
little legs in irrepressible sympathy with the 
notes; and anyone who has lived near a 
cavalry regiment will often have seen a horse 
literally dance to the strains of the band. 

It is a mistake to think, as many do, that 
musicians, when they compose great pieces, 
are filled with visions of nature in her varying 
moods, or of triumphant processions, or angelic 
hosts, and that they endeavor to interpret those 
soul-inspiring visions by the medium of har- 
mony. It is true that geniuses like Beethoven 
and Mendelssohn occasionally used such themes 
for their compositions, and reproduced some of 
nature's great scenes; but, generally speaking, 
when Beethoven composed one of his mag- 

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CHARM OF MUSIC 

nificent sonatas, or Mendelssohn one of his 
graceful "songs without words/' he was not 
rapt in ecstatic visions, but in an ecstasy of 
sensuous sound, and his soul was moved not by 
high aspirations and lofty conceptions of 
righteousness, heroism, or duty, but throbbed 
with a flood of glorious measured harmony, so 
satisfying his psychological desire for rhythm, 
and his material sensibility to sound, that it 
may have seemed to him as if his soul were 
lifted to celestial heights. 

In saying this I do not wish to degrade the 
power and influence of music. On the con- 
trary, my intention in writing this article is to 
sum up the sublime influence of music; but I 
think everyone should realize that it appeals 
primarily to the senses, and therefore should 
not expect musicians to be more virtuous or 
more etherealized than their fellow-men. 

A Universal Harmony 

But music has an infinite power as a means 
of recreation for the weary mind, and is a 
source of probably the keenest and purest 
sensuous enjoyment of any that delights the 
soul of man. From the bottom of my heart 
I pity a man or woman whose ears are deaf to 
music, for they lose one of the greatest means 
by which one's life may be sweetened. One 

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CHARM OF MUSIC 

may turn in every mood to music and find 
sympathy that soothes one or stimulates one 
at his will. In time of sorrow, when the world 
weighs heavily and a discord breaks the melody 
of life, the man who can turn to some little 
instrument and make it give expression to the 
cry of pain which would otherwise remain 
locked in a dumb inarticulate soul, will find 
some such relief as the pain-racked physical 
body soothed by a nerve-deadening opiate. 
And so with joy, seeking expression for its 
exuberance of emotion. Music will carry away 
the spirit on a flood of rippling notes that 
exhilarate the senses and harmonize with one's 
emotions as nothing else can. But apart 
from extremes of sorrow and joy, music is an 
accompaniment to everyday life that mankind 
could ill spare. The world is full of music, 
which even though unskilled and inartistic, 
yet in its spontaneity and in its power of 
stirring one's sense of harmony, is a source of 
enjoyment not less great, because for the most 
part unconscious. The song of the birds, the 
humming of the insects, the lowing of cattle, 
the rippling of a brook, the wind through the 
trees, is nature's music; and the universal 
melody is increased by the light-hearted singing 
of a maid at her work, the whistling of a 
schoolboy, the chimes of a church-bell, the 

83 



CHARM OF MUSIC 

whirling notes of a piano-organ, and the 
thousand and one strains without which life 
would be deaf and dumb. It is true that such 
melody may not be according to the highest 
rules of art, but it may affect us as fully as the 
greatest work of genius. A few notes hummed 
in a light mood vibrate the chords within us, 
and our imagination may idealize the melody 
imperfectly rendered into most glorious har- 
mony. 

Music at Home 

We in this country suffer from the imputa- 
tion of being an unmusical race. In Italy, 
that land of song, the peasants speak to one 
another for the hour together in a melodious 
sing-song that is very pleasant to the ear. 
No doubt the climate is in their favor, and 
they are born with deep musical voices that 
invite them to carol like the birds. Yet the 
Germans, a Northern race, take precedence in 
the world of music. Still, I think we are 
improving in this respect, and there are now 
very few homes in which a piano at least 
cannot be found. 

I think that every child should, if possible, be 
given an opportunity of learning some instru- 
ment, and given a good musical education, 
unless it is seen that he or she is hopelessly 

84 



CHARM OF MUSIC 

without an ear for music. It is a great source 
of enjoyment and recreation in home life. 
It is delightful to me to go into a family where 
each member is proficient upon some instru- 
ment, and see the mother, for instance, seated 
at the piano with her sons and daughters 
grouped around her, joining in a pleasant 
discourse of sweet sounds. 

Of course, of all the instruments, the human 
voice is the most perfect, and the one that has 
the greatest power over man's heart. A gifted 
singer rendering some lovely song, in which the 
words express some poetic thought to which 
the notes are in sympathetic harmony, holds 
his audience captive to his breath, thrilling 
them with the emotions which he expresses, 
stirring them with the passion of his own soul. 

Shakespeare, a musician of most exquisite 
ear, has explained in many lovely lines the 
wonderful influence which music has upon 
human nature. 

To realize the magic influence of music to its 
fullest extent one must hear it in an untram- 
meled mood, not in the prosaic atmosphere 
of a concert-room, but in nature's spacious halls. 

"Soft Stillness and the Night" 

I remember one summer's evening, a year 
or two ago, I was lying upon a barge in a reach 

85 



CHARM OF MUSIC 

of the Thames near Gravesend. The sun 
was setting in the west, flooding the water with 
a golden light, and the red sails of a fleet of 
barges, waiting idly for the turning tide, 
seemed bathed in blood, while the sky was like 
a placid sea, studded with golden islets. Not 
a sound came along the river save the splash of 
the ripples against the vessel's side. Then 
suddenly floating across the water, from some 
unknown source, came a melody which set my 
heart vibrating with a weird emotion. It was 
but a simple glee sung by some women's 
voices, and, though the singers were nearly a 
mile away, behind the bend of the river,. I could 
hear every word distinctly: 

"A boat, a boat, haste o'er the ferry, 
And let's be gay, and let's be merry." 

Never in my life have I been so stirred by any 
strain of music, yet I could not tell why, save 
that, as Lorenzo said in The Merchant of 
Venice, 

"Soft stillness and the night become the touches of 
sweet harmony." 

When the boat came into sight I saw it was 
laden with *a merry party of holiday-makers — 
two lads and four bouncing, bonny lassies. 

86 



CHARM OF MUSIC 

Commonplace and unethereal, yet in the 
distance on that summer eve their clear voices 
had sounded like a harmony from angelic 
spheres. 

The Pleasures of Mediocrity 

There is a somewhat common tendency 
among people who attend good concerts and 
appreciate fine music, finely rendered, to 
disparage any amateur performance which does 
not reach a professional excellence, and to 
discourage any effort to render simple music 
in a simple manner. I have no sympathy with 
these superfine critics. 

I appreciate the performances of great 
musicians as well as any, but that does not 
spoil my enjoyment for the music of the home 
circle. A piece from one of Sullivan's operas, 
one of Handel's simple but majestic harmonies, 
one of Chopin's easier valses, one of Grieg's 
lullabies, any good piece of music performed by 
someone who makes no pretence to vie with 
Paderewski, but rendered with fair accuracy 
and fair expression, is eminently pleasing to 
me and to many another. And one of the 
good old songs, or, for the matter of that, one 
of the good new songs, may give immense 
enjoyment to its hearers, though sung by a 
voice that cannot boast an equality with Patti 

87 



CHARM OF MUSIC 

or Caruso. No one need sigh because they 
cannot scale the topmost summit of perfection, 
but should be satisfied with a pleasing medi- 
ocrity. Life without music would be like a 
world without sun, and if we cannot all be 
great musicians, let us at least be moderate 
ones. 



88 



NINTH TURN 
Sermons in Stones 

The Spirit of the Past 

Not long ago an intimate friend of mine 
received a visit from a distinguished American 
lady who had just arrived in England with an 
introduction to him. Wishing to pay her some 
civility, and thinking that his love and enthu- 
siasm for one of England's greatest treasures 
might enable him to give her a pleasant hour 
or two, my friend took his visitor to West- 
minster Abbey. The lady listened eagerly to 
his description, punctuating it with intelligent 
questions and remarks, but suddenly she left 
his side and walked hurriedly into the cloisters. 
Wondering at her behavior, my friend followed, 
and, to his embarrassment, found the shrewd, 
seemingly hard-headed American woman 
bathed in tears. She could not explain her 
emotion — "tears, idle tears, I know not why ye 
flow" — but upon reflection the reason is clear. 
A representative of the New World, a disciple 
of modernity, had suddenly been taken into 
the mausoleum of the Old World, full of the 
ghosts of old centuries, full of silent witnesses 

89 



SERMONS IN STONES 

to the antiquity of the race from which this 
Western woman had sprung, where yesterday 
is merged into today, and today stretches back 
to yesterday, and whose stones speak with a 
voice that echoes through the ages of time. 

But though to every man and woman great 
cathedrals, churches, castles, and manors, 
must teach lessons of no little worth, and 
breathe out a spirit that must be elevating, it 
is not everyone who has the knowledge requisite 
for the full understanding of all that these 
buildings can teach, nor for the full enjoyment 
of their historical interest and their artistic 
beauties. Those only who have studied at 
least the principles of architecture can appre- 
ciate to the full the immeasurable and wonder- 
ful wealth of interest that historic buildings 
afford. 

The History of Building 

Architecture is one of the most fascinating 
of studies. It comes in contact with everyday 
life in a very practical way, and yet carries 
with it an infinity of art, science, poetry, 
history, and romance . It gives to life a new 
and extensive interest, and as there is hardly 
a town or village in this country which does not 
afford many examples of architectural styles, 
so also there are few who would not find a 

90 



SERMONS IN STONES 

study of architecture lift them above the 
commonplace and prosaic. 

To ordinary uneducated eyes an old church 
or cathedral is only regarded as a whole, and 
only the general effect observed. But to the 
trained eye there are a thousand details to be 
studied, and a thousand points of interest 
which are passed unnoticed by the majority. 
Perhaps it is the delicate fan-tracery of the 
vaulting of a Perpendicular church, or the 
foliated moulding of an Early English capital, 
some grotesque gargoyle, or a squint for the 
convenience of lepers, a four-centered arch or 
Norman doorway; no matter in what church 
that has survived the hand of time, there are 
always features of architectural interest to be 
regarded. 

One of the most interesting branches of the 
subject is the historical evolution of the 
Gothic style, which in Europe was in vogue 
from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. 
To anyone who has studied its principles it 
is a matter of little difficulty to ascertain the 
date of any church, or of any part of a church, 
to within five years; and any students of 
architecture will bear me out in saying that 
some of their most delightful hours have been 
spent in considering all the features of an 
ancient building in order to arrive at a 

91 



SERMONS IN STONES 

well-founded conclusion as to its proximate 
date. 

Nor is it less delightful to trace this evolution 
of medieval architecture through all its 
transitions from the Norman to the Early 
English, from the Early English to Decorated, 
and from the Decorated to the Perpendicular 
styles. There are many buildings in this 
country which contain examples of every style 
and of every transition, and there are also 
many that are perfect examples of one style, 
so that there is no difficulty for the student of 
architecture to find specimens with which to 
bear out his book-learning. 

Norman Architecture 

There are, for instance, a large number of 
splendid examples of the pure Norman style 
still existing in England, of which, to mention 
but a few, I may cite the cathedrals of Canter- 
bury, Peterborough, Durham, and parts of 
Winchester and Lincoln; while all visitors 
to the Tower of London will remember the 
chapel of St. John on the second floor of the 
White Tower, which is the earliest example of 
pure Norman work in England, the great 
Keep of the Tower having been erected by 
William the Conqueror in 1078. In Scotland, 
Kirkwall Cathedral is the finest example, and 

92 



SERMONS IN STONES 

this style may also be seen in the abbeys of 
Dunfermline, Kelso, and Jedburgh. The 
Norman style was originated by the Northmen 
under Duke Rollo and his sons soon after their 
conquest of the North of France, where, not 
satisfied with the little churches then common 
in that country, they wished to raise monu- 
ments of a splendor that would be worthy of 
their conquest. Some of their ideas they 
obtained from the Germans, but they adopted 
the plan of the Roman Basilica of central and 
side aisles, and at the east end they always 
placed a semi-circular apse. In England, 
however, where the style was introduced at the 
Conquest, instead of having a circular apse, 
a square east end was usually preferred. 

It is easy enough to distinguish the chief 
characteristics of this style. It is notable for 
massiveness and a grand simplicity. The 
pillars dividing the aisles from the nave are 
cubical and of large circumference. A square 
tower is a feature generally introduced, and 
the interior ornaments are simple but various 
and effective, such as the zigzag, nail-head, 
billet, etc. The capitals are, in the early 
Norman style, of the cushion character. The 
windows and doors have semi-circular arched 
heads, and the roof of the nave is generally 
wooden, the side aisles alone being vaulted. 

93 



SERMONS IN STONES 

The Early English Style 

The transition from Norman to Early- 
English came with the pointed arch, which was 
found to be of far better use for vaulting than 
the old semi-circular arch, which often had to 
be supported by heavy buttresses. The 
principles of Gothic pointed architecture, 
known as Early English, were fully developed 
in the^ twelfth century. Gothic was not the 
invention of a single individual, but a gradual 
and necessary development from structural 
requirements. The alterations in structure 
naturally brought with them alterations of 
decoration and detail. We now have the 
narrow lancet windows, high gables and roofs, 
and simple pinnacles and spires. Instead of 
the heavy Norman buttresses we have them 
shallow, and the shafts of the piers, which were 
formerly so massive, are now slender, either 
simple or clustered. The capital, which is 
bell-shaped, is now ornamented with foliage, 
and the mouldings are well defined and give 
strong light and shade. Salisbury Cathedral 
is a perfect example of this style, and it may 
also be seen in the nave and transepts of 
Westminster Abbey, in the choir of Glasgow, 
and the remains of Elgin Cathedral, to mention 
but a few. This style commenced towards the 
end of the twelfth century, and merged into a 

94 



SERMONS IN STONES 

transitional state at the end of the thirteenth. 
This transition is noticeable in the window 
tracery and ornamentation. 

In the Decorated style which follows, the 
windows are divided by a number of thin 
"mullions," and the upper portions are filled 
with tracery, which in the early condition of 
the style were geometrical forms, such as 
combinations of circles, trefoils and quatre- 
foils. Later on the tracery departed from its 
geometrical lines, and became more flowing 
and intricate. In the same way conventional 
ornaments were abandoned, and the sculptors 
lavished their imaginative genius upon making 
the stones alive with natural forms and figures. 
From about 1270 to 1375 are the dates for this 
most beautiful of Gothic styles, and among the 
leading examples I may cite the nave of York 
Cathedral and the choir of Lincoln. 

The Perpendicular Style 

We now come to the Perpendicular style, 
which is easy enough to distinguish. Straight 
lines are now prevalent, and the flowing 
tracery of the windows gives way to perpen- 
dicular divisions of the lights. The walls are 
often decorated with rectilineal paneling, 
and the doorways have square heads over 
pointed arches. Here we sometimes find what 

95 



SERMONS IN STONES 

is known as the four-centered arch, but the 
glory of the style is the exquisite fan-tracery 
of the vaulting, such as that in Henry VII's 
Chapel, Westminster. We also get the beauti- 
ful ornamented open timber roofs, of which 
Westminster Hall, built in the reign of Richard 
II, is the largest and most perfect example. 
This style prevailed from the end of the 
fourteenth to the middle of the sixteenth 
century, and its latter characteristics are some- 
times denominated as Tudor. In France the 
Gothic style was completed by the Flamboyant, 
so called from the flame-like tracery of the 
windows, etc.; but though this style is some- 
times surprisingly effective, as a general rule 
it is technical skill run riot, and more calculated 
to show the cleverness of the mason than the 
artistic sense of the architect. 

Here, then, is the barest outline of the history 
of Gothic architecture, sufficient perhaps to 
give a glimpse of the fascination of the subject. 
But the student of architecture may look 
forward to years of pleasant study without 
exhausting all that is to be learned. 

American architects have produced some 
meritorious work in recent years, the most 
characteristic result being the sky-scrapers 
which modern necessity has forced into certain 
cities. The Woolworth Building, in New York 

96 



SERMONS IN STONES 

City, has been called a beautiful piece of archi- 
tecture, and many American public buildings 
and country houses are worthy of study. 



97 



TENTH TURN 

English Novels and Novelists 

As I have said on a previous page, the nine- 
teenth century was marked by the evolution 
and luxuriance of the novel. It is a form of 
literature to which everyone now turns, not 
only for amusement and light reading, but for 
education in modern philosophy, in scientific 
theories, and the latest religion evolved from the 
heated and imaginative brain of some modern 
prophetess who issues her prophetic utterances 
in a neatly-bound volume. The modern novel, 
in fact, is as various in style and subject as the 
whirling thoughts that pass through the brain 
of man. Unfortunately modern novels are 
not so rich in quality as in quantity. To put 
it plainly, out of the abundant harvest that 
the ever-recurring publishing seasons bring 
forth, all but one in a hundred (or thereabouts) 
are of no more worth than to while away a 
leisure hour or two when the brain is fagged, 
and wants mere recreation of an easy and agree- 
able kind. There is plenty of talent nowadays — 
never more so throughout the story of our 
literature. But talent is not genius, and to 
spend more than an hour or two a week on the 

98 



NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

reading of talented trivialities, however pleasant 
they may be, is to waste precious hours that 
might be more profitably spent in deeper and 
wiser reading. 

Fortunately, however, there are many novels 
of more than ephemeral interest, and to read 
them, and re-read them, is to gain a broad 
culture of heart and head. Being an omniv- 
orous novel-reader myself, it is not for me to 
decry their worth. On the contrary, my pen 
runs willingly into a panegyric in their honor, 
to tell of their soothing influence upon the 
jangled nerves after a day of worry, to tell of 
their wizard's spell which lifts the mind from 
the ruck of everyday commonplace to new 
realms of fancy and enchantment, to name the 
characters who are more real in the mind than 
many with whom we walk and talk, and friends 
of fiction so dear that we would hardly change 
them for beings in the flesh, to conjure up the 
bright and pregnant thoughts with which they 
have stocked our otherwise dull and barren 
minds, to sum up the knowledge of human 
nature and of the greater world that lies without 
the circumscribed area of our own little sphere. 

Jane Austen 

Jane Austen is the name that comes first 
among the great novelists of the nineteenth 

'99 



NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

century, and it outshines many of those that 
come after her. Her novels are among the first 
examples of the English domestic story, and it 
is doubtful whether they have ever been 
equaled or surpassed within the rather narrow 
limits of their class. She described human 
nature as she found it, and trying no high 
flight of fancy, portrayed with unerring insight, 
impartial truth and bright humor, the charac- 
ters of the men and women whom she met in 
her quiet cultured life at Steventon, in Hamp- 
shire, of which her father was the rector. So 
precocious may genius be that by the time 
she had reached her twenty-second year, before 
the sweet charm of girlhood had quite ripened 
into the fulness of womanhood, she had written 
two of her best books, Sense and Sensibility 
and Pride and Prejudice. She died when she 
was only forty-two, by which time she had 
written Mansfield Park and Emma, Northanger 
Abbey and Persuasion, the last two being 
published the year after her death, when, for 
the first time, the authorship of the whole 
series was known to the world at large. She was 
modest of her own accomplishments, and 
wrote of "the little bit (two inches wide) of 
ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as 
produces little effect after so much labor." 
Yet so great an author as Sir Walter Scott 

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

acknowledged his inferiority to her genius, 
writing in his diary: "That young lady had a 
talent for describing the involvements, feelings, 
and characters of ordinary life, which is to me 
the most wonderful I have ever met with. 
The big bow-wow I can do myself like anyone 
going, but the exquisite touch which renders 
commonplace things and characters interesting 
from the truth of the descriptions and the 
sentiment is denied to me." 

Sir Walter Scott 

Scott's judgment is reinforced by the unani- 
mous verdict of critics, except that, with regard 
to his own "big bow-wow," we will not allow 
such a phrase to describe the glories of the 
Waverley novels. Scott himself was a painter 
in glowing colors on a broad canvas. Better 
than any romance writer before or since, he 
could build up a great scene of medieval 
pageantry. Better than any author since 
Shakespeare, he could put upon his seen ethe 
heroic or historic characters of past ages, and 
make them act and speak with living reality, 
so that the modern reader loses his twentieth 
century and is back again in the days of old 
renown. His history is not perfect (neither 
was Shakespeare's), but his romance has the 
very vital breath of chivalry. To those who 

101 



NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

have read Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, The Talisman, 
Quentin Durward, The Fair Maid of Perth, 
and The Fortunes of Nigel, history itself has a 
different meaning, and we are brought in 
closer touch with the ways and deeds of our 
forefathers. Though Sir Walter was no subtle 
psychologist, and could not put his finger on the 
pulse of the ordinary man or woman, whose 
wild beating, in spite of outward calm, may 
reveal the secret passions of the heart, he 
knew human nature in its broad aspects, and 
could portray it with strength as well as 
humor. There are many fine portraits in his 
long gallery, and I, for one, would not miss the 
friends I have made in Waverley, Rob Roy, Guy 
Mannering, Peveril of the Peak, The Bride of 
Lammermoor, not to mention all the long list 
of these splendid historical novels. 

Charles Dickens 

Dickens was a genius of another sort, less 
trained and more luxuriant, a child of modern 
city life, having in his own soul the ineffaceable 
impression of its tragedies and of its pathos, as 
well as of its comicality, which, often enough, 
goes hand in hand with tragedy. He knew the 
life of the city clerk, of the small shopkeeper, 
of the lawyer's drudge, and of all the types of 
what is called the lower-middle class, better 

102 



NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

than any man living, for he had been brought 
up in it, and his nature was like wax to receive 
impressions, and cast-iron to retain them. He 
had an amazing eye for all that is odd and 
eccentric in human nature, those queer little 
tricks of speech and manner and dress, which, 
though seemingly superficial to the character, 
betray something of its secrets. Above all, he 
was an emotional man. As a child in London 
the iron had entered into his soul, and his heart 
always throbbed in revolt of the misery and 
sordidness of the poorer classes of the great 
city. He was stirred to indignation at the 
tyranny of rich over poor, of strong over weak, 
of vice over virtue. And he had a tender, 
almost womanish heart, that loved to linger 
over the domestic joys and sorrows of the 
people. Best of all, perhaps, he had an exuber- 
ant sense of humor which shed a golden glow 
over the most commonplace and sordid scene, 
and transfigured the veriest " counter- jumper" 
or cockney into a being of irresistible drollery. 
There are some who say that the fame of 
Dickens is dying, and that his works will not 
outlast this generation except as literary relics. 
It would be a shame upon us if it were so; but 
the publishers of his novels deny the statement 
and say that, according to the sales, never have 
his books been more widely read. I cannot 

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

imagine the mind who can find no enjoyment 
in Dickens. There must be something wrong 
in it — some crank, or cross-grained humor, for 
if there is such a thing as imagination, as 
comedy, as pathos, then Dickens must be the 
master to whom all must do honor. 

W. M. Thackeray 

Contemporary and equal in high rank with 
Dickens was William Makepeace Thackeray. 
The two novelists were very different in 
temperament and literary style — Dickens 
almost rioting in imagination, laying on his 
colors thick; Thackeray more classic and 
cultured, gaining his force by restraint rather 
than exuberance; Dickens the scribe of the 
lower classes, Thackeray of the upper classes; 
Dickens the attacker of social evils, Thackeray 
of society vices; Dickens the ruthless enemy 
of middle-class tyranny and of lower-class 
selfishness, Thackeray of upper-class snobbery 
and of genteel villainy. Dickens revealed the 
human heart by men's exterior mannerisms, 
and by their action under stress of a master 
passion. Thackeray delved deeper, and showed 
the everyday workings of the human heart 
itself beneath the mask presented to the world. 
His imagination was less luxuriant, but his art 
more subtle. Vanity Fair is a masterpiece of 

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

satire, Esmond, and its sequel The Virginians, 
less satirical but perfect in style, exquisite in 
the delineation of character. Barry Lyndon 
is probably the most powerful portrait of a 
consummate villain in any literature of any 
nation, and Pendennis and The Newcomes 
are the finest pictures in prose of English life 
in the early Victorian period. 

George Eliot 

Next on the list of great names comes George 
Eliot, who struck out a new line of fiction. 
She wrote with a sterner, deeper purpose than 
her predecessors. She looked out upon the 
world with sorrowing, brooding eyes. She saw 
more sin than virtue, more misery than glad- 
ness, and the time to her was full of evil portent. 
She wrote with the soul's desire to raise a 
warning voice among the people, to point out 
to them the stern necessity for moral restraint, 
for intellectual largeness, for brotherly charity, 
if they did not wish to sink into the degrada- 
tion of despair. Learned as few men or women 
are, gifted with a noble eloquence, having 
suffered and sorrowed and searched, she exerted 
the powers of her great mind to strip the human 
soul naked, to show it in all its pitiful weak- 
ness, with all its inherited vice, with its latent 
germs of heroism and nobility, with its infinite 

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

capacity for good or evil. Yet together with 
this temperament of the preacher she had 
humor as well as sarcasm, and infinite tender- 
ness as well as strength. There are few stories 
in the English language so great as Adam Bede, 
Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, Middle- 
march, Daniel Deronda, and Scenes from 
Clerical Life. 

Edwaed Bulwer Lytton 

With these names we have exhausted the 
most splendid on the list of nineteenth-century 
novelists, and now we must descend somewhat. 
Bulwer Lytton is one in the next rank, and 
although in his temperament there was a good 
deal of the charlatan and the sentimentalist, 
it seems unkind to say so in view of the 
immensely entertaining novels he has left for 
our enjoyment. I confess that I have never 
been more enthralled by fiction than when I 
read his splendid trio — The Caxtons, My Novel, 
and What will He do with it? They are brilliant 
imitations of the masterpieces of Fielding, 
Sterne, and Smollett; and what is much to their- 
honor if not to their genius, they are not dis- 
figured by the coarse humor of the earlier 
English novels. Personally I do not care 
much for his prodigies of sentiment — Night 
and Morning, Alice, and Ernest Maltr avers, 

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

but I acknowledge as old favorites his stirring 
historical romances, The Last of the Barons, 
and Harold, and his idealistic but very charming 
novel of Kenelm Chillingly. 

A Cluster of Bright Names 

Charlotte Bronte had the true hall-mark of 
genius, sincerity, and enthusiasm. Jane 
Eyre is a marvelous piece of work, most 
marvelous when we consider the narrow envi- 
ronment and the limited experience of its 
author. Shirley also shows extraordinary 
imagination and power, though not to be 
compared to the almost titanic force of With- 
ering Heights, by Charlotte's sister Emily, 
which is as gruesome a piece of realism as any 
of Zola's. 

Anthony Trollope and Wilkie Collins come 
in the third-rate rank, though the first produced 
some very entertaining and artistic novels, and 
the latter holds the highest rank in sensational 
fiction, which has a crowd of modern disciples, 
many of them of very objectionable character. 
I must say a good word or two for Samuel 
Lover and Charles Lever, whose rollicking 
Irish stories are the best cure I know for the 
megrims. There are few such downright good 
fellows as Handy Andy, Harry Lorrequer, and 
Charles O'Malley. Harrison Ainsworth, too, 

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

was a friend of my boyhood, for whom I still 
keep a warm corner in my heart. Jack 
Sheppard has been called the most dangerous 
book ever written, and I confess, when I read 
it at the age of thirteen, I had a temporary 
ambition to be a professional burglar. But 
that passed! His Tower of London holds its 
own still, and there are few books out of his 
long list which I did not devour and enjoy in 
earlier days. Greater than he, however, was 
Charles Reade, whose masterpiece, The Cloister 
and the Hearth, I have just read again with 
immense pleasure. It is a big thing to say — 
but I don't think Scott wrote anything finer, 
nor in some ways quite so fine. His other books 
are far below this in merit, but many of them 
are as powerful as they are realistic. Charles 
Kingsley's Westward Ho! is worthy of name 
beside The Cloister and the Hearth, and his 
Hypatia and Hereward the Wake are almost as 
fine. I do not much care for his Alton Locke, 
though it contains some powerful writing. 

Novelists of Latterday Repute 

Now I come to more modern writers, and I 
use the little space left to me to give but a word 
or two to the best of them. Mrs. Oliphant and 
Mrs. Craik are two writers who did honor to 
their sex, and John Halifax, Gentleman, by 

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

the latter, is worth its weight in gold. Mrs. 
Humphry Ward's great books, Robert Elsmere 
and David Grieve, set the fashion for the modern 
problem novel, and there are few to be com- 
pared with them. Mrs. Henry Wood's novels 
are for those who want more entertainment 
than instruction (though they are true studies 
of modern social life). George Meredith is put 
on a high pedestal by those who like brilliant 
epigrams and a polished style. I admit (and 
I know it to be heresy) that his works do not 
appeal to me, as I cannot help feeling that his 
art is artificial and his genius clouded with 
mannerisms. 

Robert Louis Stevenson founded a new 
school, and is now almost a classic. Treasure 
Island is perhaps worthy of being mentioned 
in the same breath as Robinson Crusoe; and 
The Master of Ballantrae, for subtle character- 
ization and realistic strength, may rank with 
the finest romances of the last twenty years. 
The Weir of Hermiston is a noble and pathetic 
fragment that gave promise of greater things, 
but those whom the gods love die young. 
David Balfour and Catriona are full of charm 
and literary skill, but they have a more 
limited interest, I think. William Black 
and Walter Besant have left long lists of 
novels, in which there is nothing great but 

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

nothing without charm and delightful enter- 
tainment. 

Novelists of Today 

Greatest of living novelists is Thomas Hardy. 
His novels are not always wholesome, and to 
my mind his views of social morality are 
strangely warped at times. Nevertheless, he 
has true poetic genius, and there is no man 
alive in closer touch with nature. Indeed, 
his prose has the melting charm of poetry, 
and his pictures of woodland scenery are 
exquisite and flawless. Some people call him 
a realist, but he is not. He is an idealist if 
ever there was one, and his Wessex folk are 
transfigured by the glamour of his glowing 
imagination. Hall Caine began by writing 
literature, and has degenerated into sensational 
melodrama. Rudyard Kipling hardly ranks 
as a novelist, his title to renown being based 
more on his poetical works and short stories. 
But his Light that Failed is almost great, and 
Kim, though not a novel in the ordinary sense 
of the word, is a masterly picture of Indian 
life. Stanley Weyman is a good English 
imitator of Alexandre Dumas, without the 
fire of his genius. Anthony Hope is always 
entertaining, and Gilbert Parker's French 
Canadian stories have a charm all their own. 

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

J. M. Barrie has a very subtle knowledge of the 
human heart, and can paint a woman's portrait 
with much grace and tenderness; while if 
Sentimental Tommy is not more autobiography 
than fiction, then Barrie has even more imagi- 
nation than I give him credit for. Zangwill's 
Jewish stories show great power, though they 
are terribly sad. Conan Doyle has done some 
good honest work, and although his Sherlock 
Holmes, which ranks first in popular favor, is 
not the highest form of fiction, English litera- 
ture has been enriched by the addition of The 
White Company and Rodney Stone, which are 
both admirable novels. Rider Haggard will 
live always on the reputation of King Solomon's 
Mines and She. A. T. Quiller-Couch, known 
also as "Q," has maintained the highest tradi- 
tions of English style, and his west-country 
stories are wholesome, fresh, and charming. He 
may also rank as the best short-story writer 
of the day. Maurice Hewlett has so steeped 
himself in the spirit of old-time romance that 
his historical novels impress one with a sense 
of absolute truthfulness. For pure entertain- 
ment Arnold Bennett has scarcely an equal, 
and H. G. Wells, though not a great novelist, 
cannot be neglected because his works are 
so brimful of thought and so stimulating to 
the man or woman who would dip into the 

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

surging stream of this wondrous twentieth 
century. 

The American Novel 

In the nineteenth century in America we 
find James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel 
Hawthorne, both already mentioned. Cooper 
received his literary impulse from Scott, and 
his novels, of which The Spyj The Pioneer, 
The Last of the Mohicans and The Pilot are 
most popular, are vivid romances of enduring 
appeal. Hawthorne's novels are romantic 
also in their appeal, but they are better written, 
in a style of exquisite delicacy, with rare pathos 
and humor, and a psychological interest that 
was an altogether new note in fiction. The 
Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven 
Gables should not be omitted from any good 
reading list, for this New England writer, who 
inherited the gravity of his Puritan ancestors 
without their superstitions, is one of the great 
masters of English prose. 

Of modern realistic writers many might be 
profitably read — Henry James, William Dean 
Howells, Edith Wharton, Robert Herrick, Wins- 
ton Churchill, Jack London in his best work, 
Ernest Poole, and a few others. The strength 
of Henry James is in psychological analysis, 
and the convincing lif elikeness of his characters, 

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

the way they act and speak and think and feel 
is almost uncanny, though unendingly delight- 
ful. The style of the later novels is so involved 
as to make them almost impossible for the 
average reader, but the peculiar " manner " 
of Henry James is really an acquired thing 
which does not touch such charming early 
works as Roderick Hudson, Daisy Miller and 
The Portrait of a Lady, 

Howells, like James, excels in detailed 
analysis of character, and his novels, aside 
from their psychological interest, will have 
permanent value for their accurate delineation 
of social types and phases. Edith Wharton in 
The House of Mirth, The Fruit of the Tree and 
The Custom of the Country has, besides produc- 
ing interesting stories, dissected certain Ameri- 
can types with the clean, sure touch of a 
surgeon, while in Ethan Frome she has produced 
a work as simple and intense as a Greek drama. 
Robert Herrick's novels are devoted largely 
to the analysis of the American marriage, not a 
particularly pleasant subject, though Herrick 
is neither morbid nor hopeless; Winston 
Churchill in his later novels also makes the 
story subservient to the discussion of problems; 
and Jack London has not always produced 
works as artistic as The Call of the Wild. 
Ernest Poole is the author of youngest fame, 

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS 

whose first novel, a story of New York, The 
Harbor, brought almost instant recognition. 

Here, then, is a list of names of the most 
renowned novelists, from the beginning of the 
nineteenth century to the present day, whose 
works have a profound influence upon modern 
thought. 



114 



ELEVENTH TURN 

On the Study of Human Nature 

The Stage of Life 

There is no branch of knowledge so generally 
ignored as the one I have alluded to in the above 
title. Yet there are few so essential to man's 
happiness, and few so fruitful of true philosophy. 
Most of us go through life with our eyes shut, 
or only half-opened to the great drama being 
played around us. The majority of men and 
women are blind spectators of life's shifting 
scenes of tragedy and comedy, of life's epic 
poem, of its heroic meter, and of its plain, 
unvarnished prose. "All the world's a stage, 
and men and women merely players," but each 
plays his little part, each has his entrance, 
mouths his speech, and takes his exit without 
studying the characters allotted to his fellows. 
Thus — to carry the simile further — it happens 
that men and women often come in at the 
wrong cue. When a fellow-actor is playing 
his tragedy they set his poor nerves a-j angling 
with their pitiless burlesque, and when some 
merry-hearted low-comedy men are cutting 
their capers and splitting their sides with 
laughter up comes a Melancholy Jacques, with 

115 



STUDY OF HUMAN NATURE 

his mouth drawn down at corners, and his 
visage woe-begone like a death's-head at a 
feast. It is like a pantomime rehearsal without 
a stage-manager. Everybody says the right 
thing at the wrong time. Nobody listens to 
anybody else. Only one or two spectators 
in the gallery watch the various parts being 
played, and distinguish between the actors. 
They alone can see that the noise of the pan- 
tomime is deafening the noble words of some 
first-rate actor, and that some small parts 
are being played excellently well. But I have 
worn out my theatrical simile, and those who 
do not see the allegory will be gaping until I 
write more soberly. 

The Danger of Introspection 

Most of us nowadays are too introspective. 
It's an excellent thing to have a care for one's 
own immortal soul, but one can be too busy 
even with such a business. It's a good thing 
to remember other people's souls. I think it 
is a very general tendency among people, and 
especially among young people, to be always 
withdrawing to the inner chamber of their own 
consciousness, either for the purpose of sweep- 
ing it clean or garnishing it with bright day- 
dreams, or, perhaps, in order to sit in the 
solitary state of their own council chamber, 

116 



STUDY OF HUMAN NATURE 

there to hold judgment upon their own char- 
acter, to advise upon their own actions, to 
reflect upon their own past and future. We 
all do this more or less, and a certain amount 
of introspection is necessary for the building up 
of one's character. But the habit can be, and 
frequently is, carried too far. The introspective 
man is often the selfish man, for he is one of those 
blind spectators I have alluded to above, who 
takes no heed of anyone's part but his own. 

In large families, where six or seven brothers 
and sisters sit at the same board, sleep under 
the same roof, day by day, and night by night, 
it will often happen that they are as ignorant of 
each other's real character, as careless of each 
other's prejudices, aspirations, and ideals, as 
if they were separated by continents. Each 
will go about his or her business, wholly 
self-absorbed, treading, in their ignorance, 
upon each other's mental or moral corns, 
jangling each other's sensibilities, outraging 
each other's most sacred feelings, simply 
because they have never taken the trouble to 
study the shallows and depths of the characters 
with whom they have always lived. 

The Master Art 

Believe me when I say that the study of 
human nature is much more valuable than the 

117 



STUDY OF HUMAN NATURE 

study of books. But, in saying this, I do not 
wish to decry the value of reading, but rather 
to maintain that the art — "the Master Art" — 
of how to live, is best learned by studying the 
varied characters of the men and women with 
whom one rubs shoulders every day, who to us 
represent the world, and upon whose good 
fellowship and service we so much depend. 
How often one hears the cry, "Oh, this 
prosaic, this deadly dull world! Romance is 
gone, and the reign of Humdrum is with us." 
This is true enough for those who think so. 
For those who have eyes but see not, the world 
is dull; for those who do not look beyond their 
own noses, life is humdrum and prosaic. 
But for those who, having eyes, know how to 
use them, for those who, having ears, can hear, 
life under the most homely conditions, in its 
dreariest aspect, within the narrowest bounds, 
is always a drama, and too often a melodrama — 
so full of broken hearts and tragedy, so startling 
in its intensity of passion, so thrilling to the 
scale of one's emotion, that the student of human 
nature, realizing all this, will be apt to rejoice 
when the play is over and he can go to rest. 

The Secrets of the Heart 

Romance! We need not look far to find it. 
It is in the life of our next-door neighbor. We 

118 



STUDY OF HUMAN NATURE 

ourselves may be a living farce, or tragedy, or 
heroic poem. That hollow-eyed, grizzle- 
haired man who perhaps is our employer, 
perhaps our clerk, hides in his heart the 
remembrance of a dead wife, hides his sorrow 
by an outward gruffness that makes men shun 
his company. That worn-looking, plainly- 
dressed woman, who is our washerwoman or 
landlady, is battling heroically against ill- 
health and poverty, to keep the wolf from the 
door for her invalid husband. That smiling 
old fellow, with the cheery, wrinkled old face, 
who sweeps a crossing near our house, smiles 
and bids a cheery "good morning/ ' though his 
bones are twitched with ague — smiles, though 
he is hungry and we well-fed — smiles, though 
he has nothing to smile for, God knows, beyond 
the courage and faith that bids him keep 
cheerful against all odds. That fellow with the 
stammer and the pock-marked face, the fellow 
whose nerves set him a-trembling at a sudden 
question, is not an object for ridicule. He is 
a hero, though he does not look like one. He 
has fought the drink devil with both hands, 
and the fight, though he has won, has left its 
mark on him. That maid-servant of ours, 
with the red hair and nose "tip-tilted up to 
heaven," may look commonplace enough, but 
her heart is awhirl with romance, and her head 

119 



STUDY OF HUMAN NATURE 

chock-full of dream fancies — for love, the knight 
in white armor, has come to her in the guise of 
a butcher-boy, and mistresses may scold, and 
masters swear, but she — and he — care not a 
toss for all the world as long as love is true. 

All Sorts and Conditions of Men 

As a humble student of human nature, I can 
vouch for the fact that more interesting than 
all the books ever written, more fascinating 
than any science built up by the skill of man, 
is that human document which may be read 
in the streets, in the dingy back rooms of the 
poor as well as in the salons of the wealthy. 
I have always been an interested observer of 
my fellow men and women. As a child I 
watched and listened, and made mental notes 
about the people I met and saw; and now, in 
railway trains or 'buses, wherever there are 
people's faces to observe, and their tongues 
go a-wagging, my eyes and ears are busy. Arid 
this I will say — which is a comforting reflec- 
tion — that the closer knowledge one gets of the 
human heart, the nearer one gets to the real, 
inmost character of people, the more one is 
reconciled to human nature. Especially is 
this so with the lower classes. In my own 
little wanderings I have penetrated into some 
rather out-of-the-way phases of society, and 

120 



STUDY OF HUMAN NATURE 

come into touch with rather unconventional 
types. I have chatted with the " gamins" or 
gutter-boys of Paris, and made friends with 
more than one of them. I have " chummed up " 
with Whitechapel costers, Punch-and-Judy 
men, street acrobats, professional rat-catchers, 
and East End Jews. I have had afternoon tea 
alfresco with pure-blooded gipsies, have had the 
unusual honor of an invitation into their 
caravans, and have listened to the story of their 
careers. One of the most interesting conver- 
sations in my life was with a circle of gipsy 
friends, and I found they had a philosophy that 
men of better education than themselves have 
no cause to sneer at. In the Italian quarter of 
London — one of the most interesting districts 
of the great City — I have spent many pleasant 
afternoons, and made many agreeable acquaint- 
ances. I spent a delightful week-end trip 
on a barge from Rochester to Gravesend, and 
found that though the skipper could neither 
read nor write, being "no scholard," as he 
phrased it, he was yet in many ways a wiser 
man than I. One of the most cheery philoso- 
phers I have met was a blind man who sells 
matches and laces at the bottom of a dark 
alley in a big town. I feel the better for know- 
ing that sturdy fellow who bears his affliction 
so bravely, so cheerily. I once wrote a little 

121 



STUDY OF HUMAN NATURE 

article about him, and I count it a pleasant 
memory that my words were read by some 
person out in India, who, feeling touched by the 
man's optimism, sent a nice little cheque, 
addressed to "The blind man who stands at 
the bottom of the alley/ ' in such-and-such a 
place. I give these instances because they are 
a few little experiences of my own, which have 
proved to me that all wisdom does not lie in 
books, and that among the very poor, in the 
ordinary sense of the word, may be found many 
riches of another kind. 

The student of human nature, if he has any 
love for his study, will find he needs no other 
key to unlock its secrets than sympathy. That 
is the only premium that must be paid. I have 
not had a very varied experience of life, but 
even to me, people — strangers often — have told 
their life-stories and their secret troubles, for no 
other reason than that I seemed ready to listen. 
I have a friend — nay, more than a friend, my 
father — who has made the most surprising 
friendships on the spur of the moment, encoun- 
tered the strangest adventures in ordinary city 
life, and listened to extraordinary confidences 
from people who have never set eyes on him be- 
fore, and perhaps never will again. Adventures 
are to the adventurous, the man who can listen 
will hear, and the man who observes will see. 

122 



TWELFTH TURN 
The Advantages of Travel 

In the Good Old Days 

" Home-keeping youth have ever homely 
wits," said friend Valentine in The Two Gentle- 
men of Verona. This statement is not to be 
accepted without modification, for our Shakes- 
peare, and Burns, and many another " home- 
keeping youth," have had more wit than a 
thousand, or a hundred thousand, individuals 
who have done the Grand Tour. Still, there is 
some truth in it, and generally speaking the 
man who has stepped beyond his own little 
local world, who has seen other nations, other 
cities, other manners than his own, is a broader, 
larger-souled being than he who judges men and 
matters from the standard of his petty parish. 

And nowadays what facilities we have for 
travel compared with the days of our great- 
grandfathers! In the good old times a journey 
from London to Edinburgh, from New York 
to Philadelphia, aye, from any town fifty miles 
distance to any other, was not to be undertaken 
without fear and trembling on the part of the 
timid, and with much will-making and prepara- 

123 



ADVANTAGES OF TRAVEL 

tion by even the most intrepid of travelers. 
And no wonder! For who could face with 
equanimity the prospect of a fifty-mile journey 
on a lumbering old coach, with perhaps an 
outside seat, an east wind biting one's ears and 
nose, a gentleman highwayman at the turning 
of a lonely road, a wheel off in a malignant 
rut, and other items of an equally disturbing 
character? In those days, too, only a man of 
wealth could dream of long journeys, unless he 
were willing to trudge on shanks' mare (and 
there are worse modes of travel than that), for 
one didn't travel in those days at the rate of 
two cents a mile. 

But now, "Nous avons change tout cela!" — 
we have changed all that — as Moliere's doctor 
remarked. Travel becomes cheaper every 
day, and the home-keeping youth is hard put 
to it to find an excuse. Such enterprising 
tourist agents as Messrs. Cook and Sons, and 
the healthy competition of the railway and 
steamboat companies, have made the man in 
the street a traveler, and converted the world 
into a " universal exhibition" with a cheap 
entrance ticket. 

Over the Hills and Far Away 

I have a poor opinion of young men who 
always spend their holidays in the same place, 

124 



ADVANTAGES OF TRAVEL 

and that some commonplace conventional 
straw-hat-and-flannels, cigarette - and - sweet- 
heart sniggering seaside resort within easy dis- 
tance on the main line. I know of young 
fellows who invariably do this sort of thing 
and consider it the height of bliss. Well, 
it's a pettifogging bliss, say I, and I know of 
a bliss on a higher scale. To an unmarried 
man with a few dollars in his pocket 
and a week's or a fortnight's respite from 
the daily grind, I would say, strap a knap- 
sack on to your back, with a change of linen, 
socks and boots (none so important as the 
last), put a guide-book in your pocket, take 
a friend with you if there is one at liberty, and 
set out with a light heart for "fresh fields and 
pastures new." In your own country there 
are many lovely stretches of scenery, free as 
the winds of God to those who wish to gaze 
upon them, and if a man with a week's holiday 
and two legs does not know what to do with 
them he is a poor creature. 

Wheeling and Walking 

Of course the automobilists have it all their 
own way nowadays, and a man riding looks 
down with superb scorn upon any poor fool 
trudging in the highway. I do not want to 
quarrel with them. I have been in an automo- 

125 



ADVANTAGES OF TRAVEL 

bile myself, and know the joy of skimming 
along a level road with the wind in one's teeth, 
and a broad view ahead when one's eyes see 
straight to the horizon. Still, by nature I am 
a tramp, and every other tramp is my brother. 
I do not like to be hampered by a machine, nor 
fettered to the highroad. I am of a discursive 
and digressive turn of mind, and hate a 
straight road as a weariness to the flesh. When 
I am out for the day with the world before me, 
I am a meanderer. When I see a little by-path 
where the trees on either side clasp their 
branches in close embrace, and the under- 
growth straggles across with the luxuriance 
of an unfrequented way, when a rabbit scuttles 
to its burrow, and the blackbird calls to its 
mate, there are ten chances to one that I accept 
such a seductive invitation, and abandon the 
straight way. Then to lie on my back in the 
sun by the side of a brook, or just outside the 
shade of a spreading tree, to listen to the 
melodious humming of nature's tiny organists, 
or the sweet swish of the trickling stream as it 
stirs the rushes by its bank, are interruptions 
to my day's journey too frequent to obtain 
the sanction of an automobile tourist. 

I admit, however, that much may be said 
for both the automobile and the railroad, and 
America is so vast that one must accept these 

126 



ADVANTAGES OF TRAVEL 

means of locomotion if one would really see 
the country. A five-day journey carries one 
from New York to San Francisco, and even in a 
short time one may see many of the interesting 
places that lie between. People travel all over 
the world and find no city so wonderful as New 
York with its gigantic skyscrapers; they visit 
Asia to study forgotten civilizations, when Red- 
skins still live on the western plains and cliff 
dwellings reveal strange stories of the past; 
they long for the Alps without realizing that 
the supreme miracle of Nature awaits them in 
the Grand Canyon of Arizona. 

Across the Mill Pond 

As I have said, one's own country affords 
plenty of charm and interest and instruction 
to the traveler, but I want to advocate also 
the merits of foreign travel. And what a 
source of infinite fascination is a trip abroad 
to the man or woman who all the year round, 
save for that brief spell, is a stay-at-home. It 
opens up a new world to one. Everything is 
so different, so fresh, so full of interest. One's 
first trip abroad enlarges one's character to no 
mean extent. One's mental focus is read- 
justed, one's mind is filled with fresh pictures. 
Though it may not be so good for one's bodily 
health, compared to a seaside holiday at home, 

127 



ADVANTAGES OF TRAVEL 

a fortnight abroad is wonderfully invigorating 
and inspiring to one's spirit. The people, the 
language, the customs, the dress, are all 
different, and therefore all interesting. 

And now half a dozen words of advice. If 
you decide to spend your holidays abroad, 
acquire before you start at least an elementary 
knowledge of the language, history, literature, 
and habits of the country to which you are 
going, and your enjoyment will be tenfold. 



128 



THIRTEENTH TURN 

The Art of Conversation 

Most people born with a tongue between their 
teeth know how to talk more or less, but 
between talk and conversation there is as much 
difference as between the beating of a nigger's 
tom-tom and a fantasia on the piano by a 
Paderewski. Conversation with most people 
is an unknown art. So dense is their ignorance 
of it, that they are more than likely to dispute 
that it is an art at all. They entertain no 
doubt that conversation comes as natural to a 
man as blowing his nose. And yet they are 
mistaken. This is one of the most difficult 
of arts, more difficult than music on any wind 
or stringed instrument, as difficult indeed as 
life itself, for fine conversation comes only 
from fine character, and that is a material not 
easy to produce. 

The Old Regime 

Conversation, as distinct from mere talking, 
reached a higher standard with our forefathers 
than is now maintained. We have grown 
slipshod in our speech, careless of phrase, 

129 



ART OF CONVERSATION 

jerking out ill-formed and disconnected sen- 
tences that but barely express our thoughts. 
The man of culture of the olden time had more 
dignity of language. It may have been more 
artificial, it may have hidden rather than 
revealed his inmost thought (though this is 
doubtful), but there was a fine grace in the 
turn of his phrase, as there was in the nourish 
of his three-cornered hat and the easy elegance 
of the bow with which he greeted his friend. 
Conversation was then looked upon as an art, 
not only worth cultivating, but indeed as one 
of the most necessary branches of education. 
A man might be wicked — the flesh is weak and 
the heart of man is prone to evil — but to be a 
dull dog in company was an unpardonable 
offence that ostracized a man from society. 

The French carried conversation to its 
finest pitch in the days immediately before 
the great Revolution. In the clubs of the 
philosophers, whose destructive theories were 
to plunge their nation into a whirlpool of 
anarchy, in the salons of charming women like 
Madame Geoffrin, Mdlle. de PEspinasse and 
Madame de Stael, at the " little dinners" of 
literary men and patrons like the Baron 
d'Holbach, conversation was the only purpose, 
and the sole attraction of gatherings which were 
attended by the keenest and brightest wits, 

130 



ART OF CONVERSATION 

the most brilliant personalities not only of 
France but of Europe. 

In these salons of old France the conversa- 
tion that made the long evening seem like a 
brief minute sparkled with a constant gaiety 
and a brilliance kept alive by quick rallying 
repartee, by pungent epigram, by bright 
anecdote, by keen flash of wit, leavened some- 
times by an undercurrent of deeper thought 
and a revelation of that new philosophy which 
was to shake the foundations of the old world. 

In England also there were coteries in which 
the art of conversation excelled. Conversation 
flourished and saw golden days when Shakespeare 
and Ben Jonson met at the "Mermaid," and 
when, as one who heard those rare encounters 
of genius has reported, Jonson's eloquence was 
like a heavy Spanish galleon, while Shakespeare 
was like an English frigate that tacked about 
swiftly, throwing in shot on every side of the 
enemy. Conversation was golden, too, in those 
same glorious Elizabethan days when Walter 
Raleigh, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser 
were brilliant stars in the Court of Queen Bess; 
in the clubs of Queen Anne's days, when Dr. 
Johnson spoke like an oracle — ungainly, snuffy, 
grease-stained, but nevertheless an oracle with 
words of golden wisdom — with such literary 
worthies as "Noll" Goldsmith, the patient 

131 



ART OF CONVERSATION 

Boswell, the fiery Garrick and the bright-eyed 
Joshua Reynolds; when Addison, Steele and 
Swift discussed papers for The Tatler; and in 
the latter days when Alfred Tennyson, Arthur 
Hallam and that reverend jester Brookefield 
made soaring thought the boon companion 
of side-splitting laughter. 

Intellectual Delight 

These are some of the famous circles^ where 
conversation has reached its highest pitch of 
excellence; but always in the world, and still, 
there have been, and are, little companies of 
men and women in which this delightful art 
is on no vulgar plane. What greater pleasure 
is there than to enter such a circle; to listen 
to the rallying banter of bright wit, to stand 
by while two well-matched minds fight out a 
duel on the tilting-ground of argument with 
the skill and vigor and with the courteous 
grace of well-trained combatants; to follow the 
thread of discourse, which leads on to a hundred 
different subjects, wending maze-like in and 
out, yet never broken or disconnected. But 
conversation is best when only two tongues 
have the wagging. No enjoyment is there 
greater among life's few real pleasures than 
that which two friends may have who, unlock- 
ing the little door which leads to the inner 

132 



ART OF CONVERSATION 

chamber of their soul, give one to the other 
those gifts which have been gathered along 
life's pathway — wild flowers of thought plucked 
from places beyond the common reach, dead 
rose-leaves that have the fragrance of past joys, 
and now and then a few bitter herbs of thoughts 
garnered in pain and sorrowing. 

This great pleasure of conversation comes 
not by nature's free gift alone. It must be 
cultivated, trained, and practiced. As a man 
may have a world of music in his soul and yet, 
placed before an instrument, is by lack of 
training unable to give it expression or to 
produce anything but ugly and discordant 
sounds, so may he also have fine thoughts lying 
deep in the caverns of his mind, like diamonds 
bedded in a rock, and for lack of training cannot 
bring them to outward expression, nor present 
them with any charm of polished speech. 

Rules for Conversation 

What, then, are the rules for this art of 
conversation? Certainly they are not to be 
laid down like trolley lines so that anyone fol- 
lowing them may reach the highest summit of 
the art. Conversation has a thousand styles, 
like any other art, and it is intimately bound 
up with temperament, which is of infinite 
variety. Nevertheless, there are certain broad 

133 



ART OF CONVERSATION 

and general rules which may be set down in our 
textbook. The person who wishes to become 
a master of the art must first store his mind 
with much varied knowledge. To talk merely 
fine phrases without solid information behind 
them (and such a thing is possible and frequent) 
is to create an instrument of torture for all who 
come within earshot of that clacking. This 
knowledge should not be of books only, but of 
men and things. More valuable even than 
knowledge is thought — thought developed by 
meditation, by wrestlings in secret with some 
of the problems of life and the soul, by keen 
and patient observation of the little things as 
well as the big things of existence, by an 
inquiring and interested mind upon everyday 
subjects. It is good to have a memory for 
anecdotes, lines from the poets and quotations 
from great writers. A lively anecdote, a happy 
quotation, to illustrate a passing topic of 
conversation, lends a brightness and piquancy 
that is not to be lightly valued. On the other 
hand, to have a limited stock of old anecdotes, 
a repertory of familiar "quotes," and to trot 
them out glibly in every company is to label 
oneself "Bore" in letters of advertising size. 
Preserve me from any such ! 

It must never be forgotten that good conver- 
sation also means good listening. A one-sided 

134 



ART OF CONVERSATION 

conversation is an impertinence of the talker 
and a martyrdom of the listener. It is like a 
game of tennis with the balls always served 
from one court and never returned. The man 
who monopolizes the conversation is to be put 
down as a public enemy. On the other hand, 
a man must not be afraid of having his little 
say, of holding the stage awhile with a good 
set speech. Conversation which is a mere 
volleying of one-phrase sentences keep's one's 
nerves on the jig. 

The Unfailing Recipe 

Next among the ingredients of good conver- 
sation I recommend humor as the best season- 
ing. It irradiates a conversation; like the sun 
shining upon a town, it turns all to gold. The 
best of humor is that good-tempered, happy 
sort which sees the ludicrous in the common- 
place, comicality in inconveniences, and touches 
every topic with a quaint ridicule. Men and 
women of this quality are benefactors to their 
kind. 

Then must you add to the recipe a bountiful 
supply of sympathy. In conversation there 
must be a quick response of sentiment between 
the speakers. Each must enter into the other's 
mood; and, as a stringed instrument vibrates 
to the touch of the musician, so should a speaker 

135 



ART OF CONVERSATION 

feel that he has stirred the chords in the hearts 
of his company. 

And now for two maxims to round off this 
monologue. Remember that speech must be 
trained continually, if one would express one's 
thoughts felicitously. When Dr. Johnson was 
asked for the secret of his eloquence, he said 
that he had always made it a rule to utter his 
ideas in the most careful, clear, and appropriate 
language he could find. Remember also that 
to speak well one must live well, for speech is 
the expression of one's character; and although 
that is a witty epigram which says, " speech is 
given us to conceal our thoughts," it is not a 
true one, and a man who would hide his real 
self must keep silent. I say again, to speak 
well one must live well; and he who would 
excel in conversation must first find charity 
and sympathy and modesty, which three virtues 
go far to make a man a good fellow and a 
gentleman. 



136 



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82 The Meditations 

AUSTEN, JANE 

53 Sense and Sensibility 
103 Pride and Prejudice 
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167 Essays 
BALZAC, HONORE DE 

221 Old Father Goriot 
BARHAM, REV. R. H. 

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183 Vivian Grey 
BLACKMORE, R. D. 

176 Lorna Doone 

BRONTE, CHARLOTTE 

7 Shirley 
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64 Villette 

BRONTE, THE SISTERS 

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156 Poems 



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24 The Pilgrim's Progress 

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164 Poems 

CARLYLE, THOMAS 

61 Heroes and Hero- Worship 
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1 14 French Revolution — I 

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155 Past and Present 

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81 Alice in Wonderland 

COLLINS, WILKIE 

18 The Woman in White 
20 No Name 
130 The Moonstone 

COOPER, FENIMORE 
134 The Deerslayer 
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CRAIK, MRS. 

5 John Halifax, Gentlemen 
80 A Noble Life 
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DARWIN, CHARLES 

69 Voyage of the Beagle 
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DAUDET, ALPHONSE 

182 Tartarian of Tarascon 
DE QUINCEY, THOMAS 

75 The Confessions of an Opium Eater 
DICKENS, CHARLES 

1 David Copperfield 
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WINSTON'S HANDY CLASSICS 

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48 Little Dorrit 

49 Master Humphrey's Clock, etc. 

50 Stories and Sketches 
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DODD, WILLIAM 

169 The Beauties of Shakespeare 

DUMAS, ALEXANDRE 

62 The Three Musketeers 
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132 Count of Monte-Cristo (Vol. I) 

133 Count of Monte-Cristo (Vol. II) 
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165 Marguerite de Valois 

173 Vicomte de Bragelonne 

178 Louise de Valliere 

185 The Man in the Iron Mask 

199 The Forty-five Guardsmen 

206 Chicot the Jester 

214 Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge 

ELIOT, GEORGE 

3 Adam Bede 
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99 Essays and Representative Men 



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54 North and South 
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94 The Vicar of Wakefield 
GRIMM BROS. 

143 Fairy Tales 

HAWTHORNE, N. 

17 The Scarlet Letter 

28 The House of the Seven Gables 

HOLMES, O. W. 

59 The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table 
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113 The Poet at the Breakfast Table 

124 Elsie Venner 

HUGHES, THOMAS 

8 Tom Brown's School Days 

HUGO, VICTOR 

128 The Hunchback of Notre Dame 

142 Les Miserables 

162 The Toilers of the Sea 

202 Ninety-three 

IRVING, WASHINGTON 

107 The Sketch Book 

KEATS, JOHN 
179 Poems 
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4 Two Years Ago 
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56 The Essays of Elia 



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76 Tales from Shakespeare 
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148 Harry Lorrequer 

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65 Poems 

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60 Handy Andy 

LYTTON, LORD 

27 The Last of the Barons 
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77 Rienzi 
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126 The Caxtons 

152 Eugene Aram 

191 My Novel 

204 Devereux 

216 Night and Morning 

229 Kenelm Chillingly 

MACAULAY, LORD 

118 Historical Essays 

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MARRYAT, CAPTAIN 

84 Mr. Midshipman Easy 

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MELVILLE, WHYTE 

85 The Gladiators 
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196 Cerise 

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70 Sesame and Lilies and the Political Economy 

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SCOTT, SIR WALTER 
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79 Barchester Towers 
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159 The Claverings 

WOOD, MRS. HENRY 
10 East Lynne 
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26 Mrs. Halliburton's Troubles 
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